Alastor15243

That actually sounds really, really cool.

Yep, that's the reason for the "playable" qualifier. With dark tomefaire for the love of christ. Whoever's bright idea it was to make dark magic a mostly-female thing and then make the dark mage classes male-only... well I have to assume it wasn't any one person's "bright idea", because that's the kind of idiocy that can only result from multiple people completely failing to communicate.

One thing I've noticed Fire Emblem is exceedingly hesitant about throughout its entire history is creating classes of certain movement types with access to magic. It seems to go, in order of most to least likely: foot, cavalry, flying, armored. The lattermost, to my knowledge, has never seen a playable magic-using class in any mainline Fire Emblem game. Even in Three Houses, which supposedly was all about breaking the weapon-class relationship and allowing units to use basically anything, they made a very conspicuous exception for magic. Flying mages weren't available until the DLC, and armored mages still aren't available at all. To this day, the only way to get an armored tome user outside of Heroes is temporarily, via engaging with a tome-using Emblem while in an armored class. Micaiah means staff-armors have a bit more luck, however. And I have to ask: is there any sensible reason behind this? For the combo to have eluded mainline use for so long, you've gotta figure they have some reason for it at this point. But I can't for the life of me figure out what it is. I get that most magic-users tend to be fragile, but the cavalry ones in particular have often received more than enough defense to see action on enemy-phase, so I can't imagine armored mages would be that devastating in the player's hands. Especially since they're in the running for worst class in the series so far. Thoughts?

Desmond is infinitely more human. He's vile, but his anger and cruelty stem from far more believably human sources. He's consumed by bitterness over a messy political marriage and jealousy over the incredibly talented son it produced.

Christ, that is some stiff competition, isn't it? So many characters are utterly hysterical for all the wrong reasons, but I think it's a big competition between Garon and Lilith. Garon is just the most shamelessly generically evil despot Fire Emblem has ever seen, but Lilith spends just about every scene she's in doing something utterly, hysterically ridiculous that the game expects you to take seriously.

Yep, exactly. Yarne being a paranoid cowardly survivalist makes a lot more sense when you realize he probably had a ton of brothers and sisters he had to watch die, either like that or in the zombie apocalypse.

If I were to categorize the GBA trinity in terms of what sorts of "knowledge" they represent: Anima: Reason (What we do know) Light: Faith (What we can't know) Dark: Eldritch Lore (What we shouldn't know)

On a related note, I think Yarne and his obsession with avoiding extinction becomes a lot more sympathetic when you think about rabbits and realize that there is no conceivable earthly way that Yarne was the only child Panne gave birth to.

Sommie and Lilith are the biggest ones for me.

Framme: The divine dragon looked at me... RIGHT AT ME!

RIP Merrin. As if I didn't hate Eirika enough already. Really, that was a beyond stupid decision for the game. Either they should've made it a mock battle without permadeath but with raised difficulty, or maybe made it so that deaths aren't for real, but the trial ends in failure the second someone gets KO'd. Or, and here's an idea... ...Recontextualize the paralogues as you diving into the Emblems memories to relive defining battles from their games... with only Alear playable from your army. The rest of your army would be fabrications based on the bond ring units, using the bond ring portrait as their portrait.

Italics: B is still pretty dang high though, the stores don't sell weapons that good for ages. And combined with lack of weapon durability meaning that weapon sticks around forever, the early promotion meta meaning units catch up fast, and the fixed weapon ranks, even giving an A rank axe to the Jagen would have a pretty big impact on how the rest of the cast plays by the time he does his job. Bold: I'm a pretty big opponent of more than two tiers of units. They have grossly diminishing returns compared to how much it would cost to give them their own models and animations. I wouldn't be opposed to making a boosted weapon rank a "reach level 10" reward or something along those lines though.

You say that like it's for a lack of trying. If Felicia weren't canonically a combat savant, Peri would have literally skewered her in their support chain.

There needs to be a bigger difference from promoting though. I don't want another Jagen who has to use iron weapons because if they gave him anything short of S rank any other lance user could use it.

It gives a crit boost in invasions, though I question why I even mention this, because it's a completely asinine boost I cannot for the life of me understand. Why is it that the gambling place is indestructible, and the prison boosts crit? I ask you!

They come with maxed out weapon ranks on Lunatic and can come with skill and class combinations useful for pure utility that are difficult if not impossible to get on a named unit.

Personally I think it's pretty kickass for an ironman run, but an issue with it is that it's not a good fit for the staff system I'd ideally like to see more of in the future, namely a staff system more like Three Houses, where the game gives you a limited number of uses of a staff but replenishes them each map. Any resurrection staff would be rather ridiculous in that setup.

I've seen some people suggest that approach to Chapter 17, yes.

I'd argue that this and longbow utility in Apotheosis, making it have viable uses on the two hardest challenges the game has to offer, should at least offer a ticket out of the lowest tier on the list.

Fates is probably their best showing that didn't make them stupid overpowered. Most notably Conquest. It really says something that the main argument given for why Mozu is a good unit is the fact that she has archer access. Conquest is a game that really validates player-phase combat, and archer is equipped with a bunch of skills that make it the best player-phase class tree in the entire game.

That's what Savage Blow is in Japanese, apparently, but they changed it in english, probably because after reclassing it made no goddamned sense.

I dunno, Etie hasn't had any trouble hitting 1-shot benchmarks for thieves and annoying staff users in my draft.

Funny enough, now that the well actually gives playthroughs a reasonable amount of SP to work with, I gave Saphir axe power 5 when I drafted her and she's an absolute monster with her brave axe as a griffon knight. Yes, I did in fact wind up making a flier out of the woman afraid of heights.

I haven't done the vast majority of the test of the DLC for the playlog so I don't wanna change that now, but I will tell you guys what I thought once I get it and play it.

I always give Byleth's engrave to Merrin's silver dagger, since I give her Ike and not worrying about crits is a huge worry off my mind. Eirika's I put on a thoron, Corrin's on Etie's killer bow in my latest run, Roy's on Louis's smashing lance to help out with overrides early game, and Ike's on a silver bow for devastating astra storms, helping reach benchmarks for one-rounding distant thieves and, say, the chapter 20 Entrap staff guy.