samthedigital

... I was saying that Lyn's single hypothetical utility against Uhai doesn't make her worth the trouble elsewhere; it's not a real case for promoting Lyn. Yes, and this isn't really relevant to this discussion. If someone is going to justify their use of Lyn they should not say that it is because she's useful. If someone is using Lyn because they think she's good in unranked play they are misguided. You just explained the reason why their durability is so much better on your own. I'll add that Lyn's HP is another factor. Her durability really is that bad. Enemy formations are not usually this simple. Take the chapter after Lyn's join chapter for example. There are 2 range locked units, 1-2 range units, and 1 range units. We'll ignore the fact that Lyn probably isn't doing so well against them (remember that most enemies have lances, and most of the axe locked units have bad stats), but she is going to be completely incapable of clearing the way or doing anything useful in the frontlines. Can you give any specific examples? I can't think of many examples besides *maybe* Dragon's Gate. Otherwise there are a lot of units that can contribute on the back ranks, and Lyn has durability issues against several enemies. She's not even great at that except against axe locked units, and most of the cast can take care of those.

Yes, but you might want to play it on hard mode so you can use your Knight Crest on a better unit than Wallace.

Yeah no, this is not true at all unless you're going to claim that every player clears the game in less than 100 turns every time. That's just ridiculous. If you're going to do pure LTC then Mozu doesn't join and Xander can contribute. If you do then Xander is still a net positive even if he doesn't save turns; not all good units do.

Good in what way? She's footlocked and doesn't have 1-2 range combat, and even if that didn't matter her combat stats aren't stellar given that she's frail. If you're trying to say that she's good relative to a game where a unit isn't viable at all then I guess sure, but that's not the definition of good we're using here; it's relative to other units. I'm sure there are plenty of people that don't find bad units fun to use, and we don't care about what people like when talking about Lyn in a practical sense anyway. Else what is the point of comparing characters?

Conquest is very player phase heavy unless you know exactly what you're doing. Player phase heavy FE games tend to make it easier on bad units. Besides that Conquest gives us a lot of tools to make use of bad units with stat potions and pairups. Other games do nothing to help bad units when compared to the ones that go into a huge group of enemies and come out alive without having put any resources into them. Even if it wasn't possible to clear chapter 9 consistently efficiency would still exist. It would just be a little different from other games.

They're not spectacular I guess, but if you're not worried about playing as efficiently as possible you can make them work. I am pretty sure that the developers intended for the player to advance as I described earlier; fighting packs of enemies piecemeal. In that context all of those units can be used rather effectively. Arthur is also ok early on as a pair up bot, so he has that going for him too.

I don't care much about child units, but otherwise just this campaign. Rev and Birthright don't hold much interest for me, so I know next to nothing about them.

Yeah, there is a lot more variety if you don't try to play as efficiently as possible, but Mozu is considered a bad unit mostly because she can't contribute much with the most efficient play. If you don't take it to the extreme she's fine; I don't disagree with you there. I don't think that units really need fixing in this game. It's just that more strategies work when we don't consider the extremes, so it tends to normalize units as I mentioned previously.

Yeah, to be sure I'm not disagreeing with you on the whole. I mainly quoted that because it gives people a good idea of what I think of Mozu as a unit. This topic is a huge mess though, and the original point of the topic has been completely derailed. It doesn't help that fundamentally speaking a lot of people here don't understand how to play efficiently. This is a good example of that. LTC runs don't even go to that map because it wastes turns. Mozu is not a magical unit that turns 1 turn clears into 0 turn clears. If we go into more paralogues and spend time making child units it's just going to let us snowball select units more, or at the very least it's going to normalize units and make unit selection less important because of the increased exp gain.

Going directly to the objective is usually more efficient. Generally we compare units based on that and not based on how they perform when playing more casually. It's generally more efficient to pump resources into units that can reliably one round on enemy phase. It's not quite as simple as in some other Fire Emblem games given the strength of enemy units, but it's definitely possible. The solution here is to find a way to engage that second pack even if you don't think it's possible. This would probably go with my last comment better, but it's easier to show you the point this way. Your example and solution assumes that enemies are strong enough that they need to be dealt with piecemeal, but that's not true. To be honest I don't think that Rolf and Gyarados are good examples. Rolf is a bad unit in Path of Radiance no matter what. Being locked to 2 range forever in that game really sucks. It's more forgivable in this game because it's harder to get units to the point where they can trivialize enemy phase; casual players will find Mozu more useful. Gyarados on the other hand can solo several Pokemon games on his own with little effort once he gets going, and this is something that Sniper Mozu can't do.

There are plenty of decent ways to kill Uhai; I'm just giving you the easiest ones. If we don't train Eliwood or Lyn we already have two units that aren't capable of doing anything else that can block Uhai. You also have to consider what it takes to get Lyn to that point. Even if she did hypothetically save turns killing Uhai it doesn't make it worth training her for one specific thing; turn count isn't everything.

It's not really worth training Lyn for a single fight given how lackluster she is everywhere else. The game hands us Athos who can tackle everything anyway. Uhai is particularly bad too because he can be trapped by any 3 characters and can't retaliate at 1 range.

how am I getting double posts, ugh

There's at least a 100 turn buffer for the tactics rank, so it's not much of an "if". As I said earlier there are many different ways of playing the game to achieve an S rank. Isadora is one of those units that might be more or less useful depending on how someone goes about getting an S rank; it makes it impossible to rate her objectively.

Generally speaking fliers do that job better. In a ranked playthrough you want your cavalry to be able to perform combat tasks and help keep infantry units keep up at the same time. That's the point Ranjin was making. The fact that she can take a Cavalier's place instead of spending money promoting them is the important thing to note though. It's not particularly efficient to promote many cavaliers, and while Isadora's combat isn't stellar it is free. In a ranked playthrough it is more helpful to be able to leave an enemy alive for something else to kill it anyway. To me Isadora is pretty similar to an unranked playthrough. Serra is probably one of the only units that I would rank lower than her in an unranked playthrough that I would value more than her in a ranked one. There might be another notable unit or two that I'm not thinking of at the moment, but it's not really that different. Isadora isn't exactly brilliant, but she isn't relegated to gaining some experience against specific enemies and then getting benched. That's why I would personally still value her over units like Dart, Bartre, Dorcas, Lyn, and Guy to name a few.

Bartre will never have the time to be a good unit. If he gets blessed he's only going to start feeling it around the time he would normally promote, but it's not even worth promoting him given that Warrior is not a great class type compared to our other options. I really don't like the TC's original question though. As I said before it's a vague question. How are we defining the worst character, and what is a meme unit? It's also largely going to depend on a person's playstyle given that there are several ways of achieving an S rank.

What units do you think are better than Isadora in a ranked run that are worse than her in a normal run? Generally speaking a character is still going to be rated based on their ability to do or support primary objectives. I don't disagree that experience is the most important rank, but I don't think it's fair to rate a character above Isadora if their only contribution is to the exp rank. Isadora comes at a time where most mounted units should be nearing promotion or being permanently benched even in the context of a ranked playthrough.

I would suggest benching Seth permanently at least. It definitely helps make the game a little more difficult.

Karla

They are definitely nesessary outside of hard mode if you want to kill bosses in a reasonable amount of time. Bosses are tanky, and Rutger is the only one who really deals with most bosses effectively. Geese and Garret Everything is usable in 7, but everything except for Javelins and Hand Axes is ineffiicent compared to 6 where a variety of weapons are used, and Bows are much better. Even if you wanted to argue that Axes suck in 6 and wanted to argue that lances aren't good (which isn't true) you would have to accept that swords and bows are bad in 7 and 8. That evens out overall in terms of weapon balance. No, I'm not. I'm implying that it's the same kind of argument. The fact that Lance and Alan exist doesn't mean that Noah is a bad character. He can make a good candidate for the second Knight Crest, and he might be the candidate for the first one if the other two don't turn out well. Seth breaks game balance much more than anything else too since we're on the subject of Seth though (to be fair the difficulty of FE8 is part of the problem). In any case, I don't know why we are wasting time with character balance when I already said that the game has worse character balance than the others. This really doesn't serve any purpose. I don't care if you think that the game is worse or not. It's a strictly subjective thing anyway. We're talking strictly about balance here. In any case, there isn't a single Fire Emblem game that is balanced very well, and I don't think that balance strictly correlates to the games being good. There are several obscure ways of collecting items in 7 too. Off the top of my head there's a hero's crest from an enemy in the fog and the ocean seal in the desert. Difficulty is fairly subjective, and the only promotion items that I find stupid to get are the ones in the chapter with Klain and Tate. They give us promotion items that are fairly plentiful anyway.

If you do decide to play FE10 on hard mode you might want to consider using a code to be able to view enemy ranges. You might also want to consider getting a completed game in order to unlock the fastest battle animations. I'm not sure how you like to play though; I personally don't like battle animations, and I find that removing enemy ranges on hard mode was a poor design choice as it doesn't make the game more difficult. It just makes it take longer to beat. Either way I'm going to definitely agree that you should start PoR on hard mode. The game is far too easy otherwise.

Primarily Rutger (or Fir if using her), but Igrene is also a good unit in some situations. Echidna and Deak are also good on certain occasions. Lugh might be good depending on the enemy type. Recruiting certain characters is also of consideration. ... They are the best weapons for most situations. You don't really have a point here. FE6 is a game where more weapons need to be used and aren't invalidated because a single weapon will always do the job better than everything else. It's the exact same thing in FE7. If you're willing to say that Noah is not worth using then you're claiming that it's not worth using most of the characters in FE7 or FE8 too. Why use anyone besides Seth for example? He can practically solo the game on his own and it's not worth training any other units. Besides, it's not as if Noah is Nino or something like that. He takes 3 levels to promote and is generally a fairly good unit.

I'm not exaggerating though. 1-2 range is much more important in 7 and 8 than it is in 6, so bows and swords are not very good. You're criticizing axes alone when the other games have it worse. I also disagree that most other FE games make it easier to use other units. FE6 maps might be large, but the game does not give the player that much of an incentive to play quickly. If you want to play casually most units are fairly viable. If you want to play at a somewhat brisk pace there are a lot of options too. Turn count requirements for gaiden chapters are rather lax, and ranked is a joke especially compared to FE7. The turn requirement is 25, and it can be completed in 4 turns while getting the warp staff. There is a lot of time to get everything. There's also the option of using mounted units to help grounded ones traverse the map quickly. It is more important to do this in 6 because there are instances where mounted units are not the most suitable ones for combat. So you're saying that Javelins are not a catch-all solution to enemy phase combat. Don't you think that it makes it more balanced than in FE7? There are definitely situations where enemies will crumple to a Javelin though, and being lance locked isn't really a bad deal anyway. Miledy has amazing combat and uses lances. Most of the Paladins are going to use Lances when they need damage. There are definitely a lot of other examples too. There is no way everyone is using swords or bows all the time.

Cecilia is fine. She has good staff utility in a game where it's rather important, and she's mounted.

If you're willing to give it an F then you need to give a ton of other Fire Emblem games an F. I've given you examples of this already. You're neglecting every other weapon type while focusing on axes too. Axes are not that great in FE6, but they are not FE7 or FE8 bows (swords too to a lesser extent), and most weapon types see some use when there is a class available to use them. The game has a Warp staff and bosses that require different weapons to kill properly. You're not going to beat the game very efficiently sticking to only mounted units. I noticed that you edited this in: Why do you think that? Javelins are good for 1-2 range, and lances have a decent amount of usage in general given that they are strong and relatively accurate. If you want lopsided weapon balance then PoR is an easy example. At least 70% of the best combat units use axes. The class balance is terrible too, but I've mentioned that. Even inside of the GBA Fire Emblems FE6 is more balanced at least as far as the physical weapons go. In FE7 Hand Axes and Javelins are the best to the exclusion of just about everything else, and it would be the case in FE8 too if axes weren't restricted. Javelins take their place in that game.