Wanda

After a week The following were injured/lost/killed in pursuit of my waifu: Est ×2 Florina ×2 Subaki ×3 Oboro ×2 Shanna ×2 Donnel ×1 Robin ×1 Cordelia ×1 Sully ×1 Roderick ×1

I had a good feeling about today. Second week in a row I've been able to do deathless with my eyes closed. Unlike some I'm always happy to see Reinhardt and Hector. Hopefully this will be just enough to scrape tier 19...

Most of my units are works in progress because I'm F2P. I had Gray, but he was -SPD... so I gave him Swordbreaker 3, before realising that Swordbreaker 3 was exactly what my +ATK Setsuna needed to be a viable Quadsuna. He would never have beaten Lucina or Olivia for a place on the team anyway, so rip Gray. I also had a 5* Tobin but I sent him home on general principle. There's nobody else in my barracks worth speaking of really, just the Askr trio (4*'d and permabenched), a 4* Berkut (fed the other to Mathilda for Ward Cavalry should I one day run a horse team), two 4* Lloyds (waiting for someone who wants Iceberg), a 4* Shanna (should I happen to pull a +SPD Setsuna), and that's about it.

There are people spending literally thousands of dollars to +10 these new Echoes units. Don't get me wrong, I've been carving my way through the Chain Challenges for orbs to get a couple of particular units, but that kind of expenditure on such a transient thing is just madness.

[double post]

Don't get me wrong, I like Oboro, I think most people do, it's a real shame she's not a better unit in FEH.

Allow me to amend my former statement from "not salvageable" to "not worth salvaging".

Aha, I see, I did not realise you had a stack of SI fodder. I have twenty units and I tend to forget that I'm in a minority.

I would have kept Odin around for Blarblade. Also, doesn't Sully yield Swordbreaker? Agree about Oboro though, not salvageable. I've had good fortune with the new banners

Spent a few hours last night trying to do Chain Challenge Paralogue 5+6 (Echoes & Brides). I don't have Horse Memeblem units like Reinhardt so I can't just trot around curbstomping everything in sight. I have to abuse position-play and the weapon triangle to make headway on Lunatic Chain Challenges where stats are inflated beyond belief. I was using Robin in to wall Faye and the swordie in the first stage, and to distract the ninja and axe in the second stage, while Clarisse and Delthea took care of everyone else. This was working fine, though Robin never survived to the third stage, he was not required as Delthea can take Alm and Lukas, Clarisse handles Clair, and the pair of them handle Faye. Then I reach the Brides. Hory sheet. I took Lucina, Frederick, Sonya and Azura, and somehow I made it to the last stage. I even was left with Lucina vs B!Cordelia, and I resigned myself to defeat when I saw Lucina's health. This was extremely silly as my Lucina is +SPD and has Fury 3, so B!Cordelia couldn't double her, so Lucina would have survived a shot at full HP, and of course Lucina regens health over time. So I could have technically won but I didn't realise that until about 30 seconds after I charged B!Cordelia for the fuck of it. Anyway, I still don't know how I managed to reach the final stage with that team as it was, and after several failed attempts to repeat that success, I decided that Sonya needed TA3 so she could OHKO Charlotte and Caeda, as this would make the Bride stages much easier and enable me to drop Frederick and bring a lancer to kill the red mage. So, TA3. No orbs to try and summon a Roy or anyone else, and chances are I would not have rolled him when I needed him, so I had a choice: I could sacrifice my Clair or my Robin to give her TA3. Well, Clair's physical perfection, and more importantly the ideal candidate to handle the red mage on the second bride map, and also she was a 5 star where Robin was only a 4 star, so I sacrificed Robin because his damage output was pretty much atrocious. I will miss him but not enough to lose battles. Anyway, so Sonya received TA3 and she almost soloed the last stages. But with whom did I replace Robin? I thought that I had no one else likely to do the job right. Except Lukas. But at only 4*, could he really wall both a swordie and Faye on his own? And do damage to them? And survive to the second stage to handle the ninja as well? Well it turned out that he could wall, and annihilate, both... and the ninja ... and Alm. Did it in one attempt. So the moral of the story is... Robin doesn't tip the scales.

My last 5 orbs. +SPD. Salvation. I also got a +RES Mathilda...

My MVP: I actually don't like Mae that much, but she's the best bonus unit I got, so I thought: 'what can I use ya for' — quite a lot, as it turns out. Good against swords, good against red mages thanks to not-atrocious-RES and QR2, and she is +ATK which makes her reasonably strong even at 4*. It's not like she could solo the TT. She relies on Soren, Olivia and a red — usually Lucina — but she's proven invaluable, especially as a counter to Celica on the last map.

I'll be honest, that's not a great squad to bring to Lunatic Chain Challenges where everybody is HUGE and where, honestly, nukes like buffed WTA blade-tome-mages have the easiest time dealing with enemies. However, I'm guessing these are your best units, or so you think, and for a long time I had a worse team to work with, so I'll just share a few principles which worked for me. For a long time, my A team consisted of Tiki, Clair, Tharja and Azura. That team is four 5* units, but they're nothing special. Tharja is -SPD, +HP (the worst IV she could possibly have). Clair is -RES — she has the same RES as Azura ffs. Tiki is a dragon, so it doesn't take much to frighten her, just a falchion or a unit with high RES, or Julia. That team can just about hold its own against favourable match-ups. There are myriad cases, however, where I have prevailed with that team against very unfavourable match-ups (e.g. Clarisse infernal GHB) thanks to position play, buff/blade tome abuse, WTA abuse, dancing and emergency healing with Ardent Sacrifice/Breath of Life/Reciprocal Healing. 1. Leave the healer at home I never bring a healer. I either use Ardent Sacrifice or Reciprocal Healing. Healers are just too inefficient, every member of the team needs to pull their weight when they have to last for an average of 5 battles. Healing assist skills also happen to synergise with B-skills like Desperation and Vantage too, making healers even less desirable to have on the team. Obviously, this is only super viable if you have someone with a Falchion or Renewal — which you do, with Minerva. Making the most out of four combat units is more effective than having three combat units and one healer, because even Priscilla/Clarine can't be everywhere at once, and any unit can provide healing or buffs, may as well use units who can do damage as well. 2. Get better assist and passive skills for moving your heroes around the field and buffing stats Being able to move units out of harms way after they have done their action helps to remove the need to bring a healer, because units will seldom be hit by other units on enemy phase. Chances are if you mess up, an unlucky unit will not survive the enemy phase to be healed anyway. Generally speaking, it's better to avoid damage as much as possible, using repositioning skills and so on. Invest in Honing C-skills. This removes the need for rally assist skills (which gives you room for positioning assist skills). I say Hones because Spurs require that your units be adjacent to each other, which is actually less likely to happen than it sounds. Similarly, Threaten skills, like the one you have on Minerva, probably won't help that much in the Lunatic challenges — the enemy's ATK is still going to be insanely high, the trick will be to strike with weapon triangle advantage or from range. It's often better to get as many buffs on your own units as possible, ideally ATK & SPD, just in case it can give you enough of an edge to avoid being doubled. Doubling is the biggest killer at any difficulty of the game, not sheer force (except from perhaps a magic nuke with WTA but anyway...) YMMV with this one, it's not entirely objective I admit, it's how I play. I use blade tomes a lot so that's probably the reason for my bias. That said, you're using Katarina — a good red mage, but unfortunately comes with a poor bad tome. If you can pull a Tharja, see which has the better stats and make sure the better mage has the Raudrblade tome. This will greatly increase damage potential and give your red mage killing power against both reds and even low RES blues. 3. Abuse the Weapon Triangle Now, as you're going through the Lunatic challenges, you'll probably be noticing that the enemy has crazy inflated stats. This means that your own team will need to focus heavily on min-maxing, getting every point of ATK & SPD out of them. Skills like Iote's Shield, while very nice in theory, are ill-advised. I know from experience, I gave Iote's Shield to Clair and watched her get slaughtered every battle. I replaced it with Triangle Adept 3 and kept her away from archers, and she was suddenly an efficient unit again. This is because Triangle Adept isn't only an offensive skill, but defensive as well, it reduces damage even more. WTA can turn any unit into a tank/nuke against units of a certain type, and while they become a whole lot glassier to other units, with good positioning you can reap the benefits Triangle Adept has to offer without suffering the negative consequences. Try to acquire gem weapons (Ruby Sword, Sapphire Lance, Emerald Axe) or Triangle Adept skills to maximise your damage potential against particular units while adding defence to those units. At this level of the game, you really won't be able to get away with fighting against the weapon triangle in most cases, so you may as well go all in on it. Remember gem weapons and TA do not stack, so gem weapons tend to be the better choice because you can keep your A-slot skills like Fury, Life & Death, Death Blow etc. 4. Get a dancer. I cannot stress how important it is to have at least once dancer. They immediately make life a lot easier on even the hardest difficulty. Even the best players rely on dancer support if they don't have a Camus/Xander/Eldigan/Reinhardt/Cecilia horse meme team. And even then, plenty of them have a dancer instead of Cecilia. The ability to conduct a second action with a unit is all but mandatory to comfortably complete these challenges, especially if you have some nukes who really appreciate being either moved away from danger or given an opportunity to knock out a second enemy. When you watch MKV do his F2P Lunatic/Infernal runs, the one thing he always has is at least one dancer, sometimes more. I tend to bring one and rely on positioning skills to do some extra manoeuvring when needed — that way I can bring another killer unit. That said, Azura counts as a killer anyway, with reasonably good stats across the board and a Sapphire Lance+ to eviscerate red units. Olivia is also a pretty good unit — not sure how well she'll hold her own on Lunatic challenges, but with a gem weapon or TA she might just be table to tank a hit from a slow green if you're lucky. Ninian's pretty good too, she's just hard to get like Azura. All the dancers are not atrociously squishy and can finish off a heavily wounded unit if necessary. They're definitely worth rolling for. ------------------- If you're totally F2P, and you haven't invested too much of your time into the game, and you aren't extremely attached to Minerva, you might consider restarting the game or creating a second account and rerolling until you have some amazing starting units that will see you through any conflict. I got lucky, I didn't need to even reroll because the first unit I ever rolled was Azura. A dancer is invaluable, let alone one that can hold their own in a fight against both physical and magical units (provided no WT disadvantage). The other reason to restart is to have all of those story orbs at your disposal again, ready for you to summon the best units and build a large store of SI fodder with which to create optimal builds for Lunatic/Infernal maps. If restarting is a bit extreme — maybe you have other good units, you just haven't shown us or mentioned them or whatever — then consider what I've said and be patient. Let the daily orbs build up, don't be tempted to roll as soon as you have 5 or 9 or 13. Build up 20 and do a full five roll. Because no unit is useless because they nearly all have some kind of useful skill. Look at Roy — I used to dread pulling Roy, but when I noticed he has Triangle Adept 3 at 4*, he suddenly became a more welcome sight. Look at Robin, I laughed when I looked at his stats, but the boy is extremely difficult to kill without a strong green. Remember I said I had a team of Clair, Tiki, Tharja & Azura? Two reds, two blues, vs Robin. Had WTA over Tiki and Tharja, tanky enough to absorb Clair & Azura's attacks. Checkmate, scales were tipped. By a unit that pretty much sucks on paper. My point is that for every battle there is a team composition that will beat even the greatest and shiniest SS+++ tier units, with enough planning and tactical manoeuvring. The Chain Challenges are just the story maps, so it's easy to check what units are going to pop up — and you can make a note of what units you can expect to face, what their stats are, what their skills are (if they have any) and use teams tuned specifically for handling those units and maps. At the same time, these challenges are intended to be difficult. I'm sure many of us who haven't spent our salaries on building the perfect Horse Memblem teams arehaving to attempt and reattempt some of these challenges, because even if you have the right team it's easy to make a mistake. Something I'm doing all too often is mis-tapping the screen and putting a unit one square to the left of where the unit needed to be, and boom dead. It can be disheartening, but every attempt is just more data about what the enemy can do and will do under certain circumstances. Sometimes it has been through mistakes that I have discovered, to my surprise, that the enemy AI either ignores a vulnerable unit or doesn't do as much damage as I had feared, due to a detail I had forgotten. I'd never know without trying and failing a few times. ------------------------ The conclusion: you probably need to grind more. Maybe a lot more. You must have some 4* units which have better potential to be powerful if only you had the feathers. Invest time in Tempest Trials, there's a huge feather reward for ranking in the top 5,000 or whatever. That'd get you almost halfway to a 5* unit, and would net you a couple of seals and a couple of Tobins in the process. You can feed the 4* Tobin to a better unit for Seal Spd 3 and max out the HM of the 5* Tobin on Tempest Trials or Training Tower for 2000 more feathers. Think about it, each unit has 2000 HM, which corresponds to 2000 feathers. Max out 10 units HM and you have enough feathers to promote a 4* to a 5*. It takes a long time, but it's worth it in the end. And don't forget, if you're running low on stamina, make sure you're collecting your My Nintendo points each week to help buy stamina drinks. There's also a stamina drink to be gotten by winning on a Tempest Trial just once. Just in case you're like me and you battle more than you probably should and run out of stamina and find yourself with the rest of the day to occupy and nothing more enjoyable to do. I hope I don't come across as some kind of ass, I'm nobody special and I'm not an authority on this game, I'm just sharing what I've learned. YMMV, and indeed I'm not quite F2P, I've spent about $60 on the game but every time I have I've pulled Subakis and Hinatas. Which is frustrating, but on the flip side, lots of my units have Fury 3 and Quick Riposte 2 so I guess it turned out okay in the end.

Roll for Mathilda, or Delthea, wouldn't be a tragedy... Oh.

I do not mind seeing these anti-horse weapons at all. The meta was getting a little stale, all you ever see after a while are teams that revolve around, or involve combinations of, Camus, Xander, Cecilia and Reinhardt. But it wouldn't matter if they came with Silver weapons. They've made many very happy with the heroes they're adding, including me. No surprise why Tobin was the TT reward character now. I was going to feed him to somebody else for Seal Spd 3, but since I have Lukas and Clair, I would very much like to complete the set and get Gray and Mathilda. Sonya and Delthea will provide much needed mage upgrades to my Soren and Mae. Even if they're worse mages than Soren and Mae, their skills will suffice.

I actually do not dislike seeing anybody. I think you only truly dislike seeing units as long as you have no strong counter to them. I used to dislike seeing archers until I managed to get a distant counter unit. Now archers do not concern me. I used to dislike seeing Linde or Reinhardt, but after having acquired a Soren I do not mind seeing them at all. Sometimes when doing the TT, Felicia can be irksome because it means I have to do a fair bit of position-play to manoeuvre my mages away from her after attacking the closer, physical units. She doesn't cause me a lot of grief, she just spoils my time rating sometimes. Same goes for Niles. I don't mind seeing either of them on the last map though to be fair. I guess I don't like seeing Olwen but only due to envy.

Mathilda, Sonya, Delthea, Gray, Saber, Leon... I guess my F2P days may soon be over unless I have insane luck tomorrow. Berkut GHB as well. Christmas is not for several months what are they doing

I think that's the one I posted... Whoa, any chance you could screencap some/all of those for my collection? I was on team Priscilla and there weren't so many merged units, even in the top 50.

True, but I think one has to really love a video game character to spend a grand on optimising them on a mobage. Or chalk it down madness, as I said.

Honestly no, because Skill Inheritance inevitably causes me to cut the threads of life of many heroes prior to reaching any HM. The units I'm optimising I've also maxed out in terms of HM — namely Azura, Clair, Tharja & Lucina. Y!Tiki and Clarisse are pushing 1000; Mae will be hitting the 500 HM mark soon, F!Corrin is at 200 or so. Though with limited feathers, I sincerely doubt I will be 5☆ing F!Corrin, and the foreknowledge that I won't be doing that (Mae and Clarisse both ahead in the queue) gets me scheming w.r.t. her Draconic Aura special attack. So she might not reach it. I had Frederick reach 467 before feeding him to Azura for Wings of Mercy — I admit that was a mistake, I should have at least pushed him to 500 before doing that, but never mind. My Askr trio are at the 200-400 mark, but only because the Arena sometimes calls for them and because I tend to throw them in with any new unit I'm training. I do not intend to 5☆ them any time soon because they're all superfluous. They're all as good as permabenched for their own reasons — axe usage, sub-optimal swordsman syndrome and not-Azura-itis, respectively.

Something which I found more interesting than who won the Voting Gauntlet was the opportunity to inspect other players' maxed out units, and I must say there were some extreme examples of dedication and perhaps even sheer madness. You can find them in the Arena too. Some builds, like the B!Cordelia below, are understandable because of the strength and efficacy of the unit (I include her because of the +10...), but others, like the Firs, are just dumbfounding. Did you see any cracking examples of dedication/extreme optimisation? Any other amazing finds out there?

Not before Nephenee if IS has any sense.

rip Clarine. I thought we had it in the bag and then I went to sleep... okay Priscilla let's do this.

For those who do not have 5* Xander/Reinhardt/Camus/Cecilia dream teams, be not afraid. Just beat lunatic with Y!Tiki, Tharja, Azura and... Frederick. A 4* Frederick, but with a Brave Axe. Have Tiki break the wall & bait the swordie, kill swordie next turn, dance mounted brave axe user around the fort killing everything else, sweep up the leftovers with buffed Tharja.