samthedigital

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.

Path of Radiance is in a bit of a unique state. I don't know that it qualifies exactly, but it does tend to favor growth units since bonus experience removes the disadvantage that growth units have. Titania is amazing to be sure, but growth units take center stage roughly halfway into the game.

You can basically use any unit that you want. Corrin is probably the only unit that you'll want to use regardless of what other units you want to use. I find that hard mode is a good tutorial for lunatic; generally speaking your hard mode strategies will work, but they might need to be adapted a little bit because of the changes. You don't really need any specific skills for most units. Shurikenbreaker isn't even that important if you're willing to cheese chapter 25, and there are ways around it even if you do want to play it the 'intended' way. Just make sure to give Corrin as many goods skills as possible. Generally speaking Corrin wants as many damaging skills as she can get; the rest depends on how you build her. Otherwise I don't think that a large amount of planning is necessary, so I'll let someone else tackle the other questions.

For the most part you can, yeah. There are a lot of scenarios where guard stance is the best option simply because it gives units the ability to clear multiple enemies on enemy phase instead of using a predominantly player phase strategy. I am not sure if only using guard stance would work, but it's certainly the most efficient option at least as often as not.

If we use the strictest definition of the word useful then this is true, but it's also true of every other game in the series. It's similar if we take a loose interpretation of the word.

Beruka can fly, so she doesn't need inflated stats to be useful. If many people forget her it's because they're trying to compare her directly to Camilla which is a mistake. You can still use Camilla and dump experience on other units. It might not be possible to milk all of the experience in a map that way, but it's not necessary to do that even if you want a full team. Anyway, this reads as personal grievances that you have with the game rather than any real issue that the game might have. I'll use this as an example. You think that it's a bad idea for units to have specialized roles. I would personally use FE7 and FE8 as examples of poor unit design because every unit has effectively the same role. They all want to be able to fight as many enemies as possible at 1-2 range. The units that do it better are generall the ones that have more movement.

I'm not sure if this was mentioned previously, but it's important to be careful in chapter 8. It's possible to give Lyn extra experience by viewing the cutscene with the ballista multiple times, so Lyn could potentally level when she shouldn't. There are several other issues with the rng and emulators that could cause issues, but I am not the most knowledgable on this. I also haven't followed this guide. I found out about the ballista experience thing the hard way.

This is the one thing I don't agree with from your post. Big maps aren't a problem in a vacuum to be sure, but the size of the maps in FE4 do exacerbate other flaws that the game already has.

I have seen the word tedious used a few times, and I would use that word along with monotonous to describe the beginning of a hard mode difficulty in most cases instead of challenging. I don't find the predominant strategy of dogpiling on a small amount of enemy units to be very compelling, so I would rather enemy stats be toned down.

Without LHM he is absolutely up there even if he's not in the running for the best unit. Some of the units mentioned are not in the running either; Priscilla, Pent, and Hector were mentioned, and they are much closer to Heath than to Marcus (not Hector, but you get the idea). As for your two criticisms of Heath... He definitely isn't going to compare to LHM Florina, but Florina struggles outside of a utility roll without it. Fiora needs something like 10 levels and a promotion just to match his starting bulk, and once he starts doubling his combat is better anyway. His join time is also actually fairly convenient since it's right before a desert map and a few defend maps if you're looking to feed him some levels.

If you're really having troubles a Pure Water and a little time on Crazed Beast nets him a decent amount of kills. Alternatively Axereavers work on the left side of the map; there are a lot of easy options there. Heath is really good in general too. I'd give him a little less credit with LHM, but it's hard to go wrong with his physical bulk compared to the other fliers.