Othin

Finally got a defense win. Still no deathless runs, but I might start spending some crests to try to get one in the next few hours. How good is -HP, +Def Reinhardt? It sounds like Atk is his most significant stat by far, so not being +Atk hurts but at least he's not -Atk.

Yeah, this is nice for anyone still getting their flier team together but pretty trivial for those of us who already did the last one.

No, the only "Drag Back" is the B skill. The assist is called "Draw Back". https://feheroes.wiki/Draw_Back Took me a while to pick up on it, too.

My arena team isn't currently doing great on either offense or defense. Maybe I should turn things up a few notches: I do have a 4* Reinhardt, and I was already planning on upgrading Xander and Camus when I get them. Over the course of a few months, I could make some fun things happen.

What characters can make good use of Swift Sparrow? I have an extra Spring Lucina and I'm not sure what to do with her.

I wonder if Zephiel's GHB will be coming soon, since Navarre's was announced almost two weeks ago and then started shortly after that. Although Navarre's was also unusually soon after Michalis's.

Sharena is already on my core team (along with Marth and Hector), so I'd been hoping for this. Looks like I can pick anyone as my fourth unit this time, but I'm not sure who. Merric has a merge now, so he could improve my points a bit, but his skills are pretty bad. I gave G Tomebreaker to Tiki a while ago, so I guess she could help with killing Nino, but that's pretty narrow and she doesn't have the SP to learn a movement assist. I'd use a dancer if I had a 5* one, but Olivia is only 4* and I don't want the points loss from using her. (I could upgrade her; she could even replace Marth as my red with a Ruby Sword, but I'm still a week away from having enough feathers for that and I have other units I want to upgrade anyway. Also that might lead to even more trouble against Nino.) I had a lot of success with Priscilla back when she was a bonus unit, so maybe she's worth using again?

All this Reinhardt talk is making me tempted to upgrade my 4* one when I get enough feathers. I want to save them for GHB characters, though, so it could be a while. Still no defense wins, and just got 4,713 points with one death at the end. Rank 16,554: bleh, that's only 4k feathers for the week at this rate.

A 3* dancer already has one of the best possible skills: one that lets one of your 5* combat units do about twice as much as they'd be able to otherwise by doubling their player phase damage, their mobility, or both. I personally tend to use 5*s over dancers, but it's way closer than you think. Dancers will not get hit "no matter what". They get hit when you make mistakes and don't keep them out of areas the enemies can reach. It's absolutely possible for a dancer to do their job without getting hit, even by ranged enemies. That's just something you haven't learned how to do yet. Personally, I haven't spent any real time using dancers in the arena, but I used Priscilla as my bonus unit for two weeks and she was able to do plenty of healing while almost always avoiding getting hit.

Fury is very easy to underestimate. When I first saw it, I assumed it was horrible because of the painful-sounding drawback, but it turns out the stat boost can go a long way.

Jeorge starts with Parthia in FE3/12, so he has a pretty strong claim on it even if it seems a bit weird.

Not going very fast so far.

L'arachel is definitely going to be a healer. I'd rather have her as a mage, but I don't think they've ever made a primary healer into a mage yet. It's not "pulling a Lucius", it's pulling a Clarine/Priscilla and giving her the exact equipment type she always used. Those are certainly assignments that would make sense from the premise of expecting the weapons to be in the game at all, but that's not something to assume. Looking back at FE6, they could have given Apocalypse to Sophia or Raigh, but they didn't. Hypothetically, it could be coming later on Niime, but I doubt it. They just opted not to include most of that game's S rank weapons at all rather than adding them to various regular characters who didn't have special ties to them. Most likely, the same thing will happen with FE8. Innes is a special case because he's one of the most prominent characters in the game (as is L'arachel, but she's a healer), but tossing around the weapons to regular characters seems a bit odd and not really fitting with how Heroes has been handling ultimate weapons. Tana and Joshua are royalty with reasonable claims to be the first in line for their respective weapons, but even they seem a bit sketchy to me, personally.

I think it's best not to get your hopes up for thrown weapons and magic weapons. Those don't seem to be mechanics they want to use in this game: letting any character turn into an archer or a mage could allow for all sorts of broken stuff. So far, we've just seen 1-2 range weapons handled as having built-in Distant Counter, and even then only on ultimate weapons. They might play around more with that space on ultimate weapons, but not on stuff like javelins that could be inherited. More Sacred Twins weapons would be cool, but they'd need to be assigned as ultimate weapons to particular characters, and I'm not sure who. Nidhogg on Innes would fit, and I guess Garm could go on Vigarde if he's included?

Hmm. I gave my Sharena Draw Back instead of Rally Attack, but I wonder if taking off Lucina's Rally might also be helpful. I've found Draw Back very threatening on enemies like Nino on the arena, although that tends to rely on them holding back an enemy with a smaller attack range so a player is forced to enter both of their attack ranges at once. With a ranged team, that doesn't work.

I decided to try a similar team: 4* Olivia, 5* m!Robin/s!Lucina/Sharena. I've been going the "blue stacking" route with an emphasis on ranged attacks, but I guess adding Lilina as a third ranged attacker over Sharena could also work? No success so far, so I'm inclined to keep trying new things.

There will probably be another set of challenge quests in like a week or so, right?

It seems like the solution is to wait for them to (re-)appear in a banner, whether through a GHB or a Voting Gauntlet or any new type of banner. Which isn't ideal, but it's something.

You could even mark it with diamonds instead of hearts.

I'm wary of GHB banners, but Ryoma is my most wanted unit right now for his sword, so if he makes it onto Xander's banner, I might have to consider it. Although I do plan to 5* Xander when I get him anyway, so I'll already have a sword user with built-in Distant Counter.

The arena does seem a lot easier than it was before, both with the repositioning and the lack of merged enemies, but that also means more difficulty in getting defense wins and in climbing the ranks. Does anyone have any defense team recommendations based on what I have?

I played a bit of the original, and I'm excited for the remake, but I'm with you on it not seeming exciting. With probably a month to go until the next non-Echoes main banner, I decided to spend about 100 of my saved orbs doing a bunch more last-minute spring banner pulls and managed to get a few 5*s, so that was fun.

The Reddit post was what I was going off of, so if it's not confirmed yet, I do hope it gets confirmed. It's something I'd been hoping for, and I was surprised that it wasn't mentioned.

It sounds like an unmentioned but appropriate aspect of the arena change was accounting for movement type, so armored units get counted on the same level as infantry units with about 10 less BST and cavalry units get counted on the same level as infantry units with about 10 more. So armors being overrepresented and cavalry being underrepresented shouldn't be as much of a thing anymore.

This sure changed a lot during this banner. Got Spring Camilla at the start, then today I upgraded Anna and spent about 100 orbs I'd been stockpiling (I don't like the look of the Echoes banner), getting Raven, a second Merric, and two Spring Lucinas for a total of 15, although only 13 are unique. I've already merged the extra Merric so I'm down to actually having 14, and I'll have to figure out whether I want to merge the extra Lucina or have her pass Swift Sparrow to someone.