Othin

Got a score of 4,846 and a rank of 888 in Tier 18! Well within the 6,223 threshold for advancing to 19, although I still need a defense win. Apparently I forgot to give Camus a seal, so that's probably why my score didn't have as noticeable of an improvement over Reinhardt as I expected. I can try to get a second deathless run to fix that, but at this point, it doesn't seem especially relevant.

I think it makes sense. It was advertised as the "permadeath mode", and permadeath isn't relevant if you can just avoid deaths by playing carefully, so the idea is that you want to take risks and potentially have to deal with the consequences of things going wrong. I'm certainly going to be taking more risks for better speed points after how my first run went. It turns out there's a downside to the cavalry twins: I mixed up Xander and Camus and ended up making my first team without a red. Was able to have everyone survive the first six maps by playing carefully, but I was screwed against Veronica. Xander came in on the second team and took her down, though, which is pretty ironic. Got B Survival and C Speed, so that level of slow, careful play definitely isn't the way to go. Does anyone know what the turn count requirements are for the speed rankings?

True, I misspoke. You could manage it by using all your teams, but if you want to max out your score, particularly survival, you need one team to make it through all the maps. That seems a lot more difficult without healers if the maps are putting up any fight.

The healing specials don't seem good at restoring your HP faster than you lose it. My plan is to just bring a healer: if these put up much of a fight, surviving them without one sounds like it'd be extremely difficult, and I don't think healing specials could be a substitute for that.

The premise of the Night Sky line was Astra, which has always been about multiplying damage (through extra hits). So making it Spd-based wouldn't have made sense. Still, it's just too weak. Knocking a point of cooldown off all three specials would make them less terrible, but I don't think even that would make them good.

I gave it to both Xander and Camus, mostly as filler because I didn't have anything better. It does go nicely with their Vantage, though.

Deathless streak is almost complete without needing crests, but no defense wins yet. I keep forgetting to check for Wings of Mercy. It hasn't usually been a concern lately, but I've sometimes gotten blown out by that.

That's odd, but I don't have a regular Lucina, so I can't complain. Honestly, since I got Xander, it's pretty hard for any other sword user to compete. Marth got knocked out of his longtime run on my arena team, and I wasn't really expecting "Marth" to do any better regardless of what her abilities were. Although a new skill (like the cooldown one) would've been cool. Wonder if this will be a regular thing for Tempest Trials, every month or however often. Get guaranteed 4* and 5* versions of an existing character with a new outfit and title but the same abilities. That'd be cool.

The team update is really nice. I often found myself wanting 6 or 7 teams on hand at a time (particularly for 10th stratum quests), so 5 wasn't enough but 8 should be plenty. Maybe sometime they'll make it possible to register different skill equippings for a character and put different ones on different teams? I'd like to be able to simultaneously have Spur Spd 3 Hector on my arena team and Goad Armor Hector on my armor team without having to switch his skills each time (especially since I forget half the time), and to be able to leave Draw Back off Reinhardt on my defense team but have it on him otherwise.

In trying that, I found that Bluestacks already has an app that can enable/disable the on-screen keyboard, and I just needed to find that and enable it, so it's working fine now. Thanks!

I'm on Bluestacks and can't get the team names to save. I can enter them, but then when I hit enter or click outside the "name entry" box, it goes away without remembering the name I put in. Does anyone know a way around this?

Running no greens sounds pretty risky.

Perhaps the enemies will be randomized, like the Training Tower? Still, it seems like a weird way to do it. "Death lasting for the rest of this one of many attempts at the multi-map quest" is a lot more tame than "death lasting for the whole rest of the event": it won't stop players from bringing in your best characters on each fresh attempt and eventually figuring out ways to do those attempts deathless.

No way to be sure yet what this week's Tier 20 threshold will turn out to be by the end, but presumably quite a bit less than last week.

Oh, the quotation marks are part of it. That does sound good.

Well, she's Marth, but she's not to be confused with Marth Marth. Like how Spring Camilla is a Camilla, but not Camilla Camilla, so she gets called Spring Camilla or s!Camilla or whatever to differentiate them.

I'm conflicted about what abbreviated way to refer to her. Like, m!Marth is the simplest abbreviation for "Masked Marth", but it seems weird compared to "m!" being used to specify "male Robin" and "male Corrin". I guess "l!Marth" could work for "Lucina Marth", but it doesn't sound as good. Of course, if we get enough different types of character variants, there won't be enough letters to use different ones for each different type of variation anyway.

Lucina's two forms so far might give us some direction. Regular Lucina has 43/34/36/25/19 stats, while Spring Lucina has 34/29/36/22/25. So she gets a lot more Res in exchange for much less HP and Atk, but still not fantastic Res. (Barely better than Marth and Alm.) So giving Masked Marth especially high Res might seem a bit odd based on that precedent, but it does give some precedent for her sacrificing Atk for Res.

It's not much more generous than 4. I'm guessing eventually they'll add more tiers beyond 20, because 20 will eventually get pretty easy to reach for dedicated players, so those will probably go up to at least 5 orbs.

One screenshot shows what seems to be the three hardest Tempest Trials: Hard with 5 battles, Lunatic with 5 battles, and Lunatic with 7 battles. So the screenshot showing the player getting 252 points from a 5-map battle seems to be at most the second-hardest trial, and possibly the third-hardest or worse. If the hardest (7-battle Lunatic) trial has a base score of 30 (rather than 20) with everything else being calculated the same way, that'll make it possible to get 529 points from it. Still low in comparison to the score requirements for the rewards, but not nearly as much.

It's named just "Quickened Pulse" rather than "Quickened Pulse 1", so I don't think it has higher ranks. That's a good point that "Masked Marth" might have it, but if she does, I think we can expect it to be a standalone skill like Lunge and Grani's Shield. And I guess it could presumably be stacked with the seal? Also, the most recent new ones (Fortify Res 1 and Spur Def 1) are C-slot rank 1, but the original ones (HP +3, Atk +1, and Spd +1) are all A-slot rank 1. Still, this is definitely new territory.

Managed to salvage a trainwreck of an arena battle through a lot of Vantage. Wouldn't have maintained a deathless streak if I still needed one, but it was still funny. Xander/Camus/Sharena/Hector vs Klein/Azura/Hector/Ike. Tried to have Xander take on Klein, but I hadn't bothered to check for Wings of Mercy, which resulted in Azura teleporting in and killing him and then Hector teleporting in and knocking Camus to 1 HP. (Azura was injured from killing Xander because he'd gotten Vantage+Bonfire to hit her back hard, which resulted in Hector being able to teleport to her.) Sharena was able to beat Ike 1v1 easily, but with Camus injured, I sent Hector over to try to fight Klein and the enemy Hector, and he did a bit of damage but quickly got killed. So I had Sharena and 1 HP Camus against Hector, Klein, and Azura. Fortunately Camus also had Vantage, and Klein and Azura were low enough in HP that he could take each of them out in one hit, but he needed to charge Moonbow to kill Hector so he had to do a lot of running around to first bait Klein and Azura and kill them, then take out Hector. It worked eventually, though.

I'd say Xander and Camus's personal weapons fall under making "the units themselves" good, especially for free players who are unlikely to have other non-Lightning Breath access to Distant Counter.

Different weapon types are pretty common for alternate versions, with Tiki as the only exception so far. (Also Masked Lucina when she's released, apparently.) A lot of people have been calling for axe Ike and bow Lyn, and while there doesn't seem to be much interest in lance Lucina, it'd also make sense since it's her secondary weapon. Roy doesn't have a secondary weapon in his own game, but the Binding Blade's fire ranged attack means red tomes could be suitable for him. (He'd already be the only red one left, but it'd also make it possible to avoid him being the only one without a new weapon type.)

Robin actually only has one version in the regular pool, since female Robin is GHB only. Corrin and Tiki are the characters with two versions in the regular pool. I do think there's a decent chance that the CYL characters will be added to the regular pool since they have no reason to be "seasonal" and there's been so much buildup, but I don't think Masked Lucina is CYL Lucina. Masked Lucina was from the Vortex Mode trailer, which seems to be coming this month while the CYL characters are still a couple of months away, and the Vortex Mode rewards seem to include at least one 5* character, so Masked Lucina is probably obtainable through it.