Othin

Fred can't learn Swordbreaker; it's off-limits to green.

Grammar can change as words pass between languages and through time. Hooray for descriptivism!

Everyone should be able to get two free Zephiels in like a month, although that's a bit late for this mission.

While it's frustrating, I do like how the restriction of what skills characters can learn based on star rank means it stays more relevant which characters can get particular skills naturally, since those are the ones that players not spending exorbitant amounts of money can reasonably get the best versions of on those characters. Like, Adult Tiki can pass on Lightning Breath to Young Tiki, but she can't pass on Lightning Breath+ unless you have a 5* Adult Tiki you're willing to give up. I'm not as concerned about facing Training Tower-like enemies in the Arena, at least once the match-making gets fixed to make those matches fair, but eroding the individual characteristics of characters was a big concern and this helps prevent that.

Man, I would've given G Tomebreaker to Hector instead of Tiki if I'd realized it was available to green units too rather than just red ones. I guess Tiki might be able to make better use of it if I give her Adult Tiki's Lightning Breath, but 8 Mt is a lot to give up... At least I was able to get a good Arena score this week before opposing skill-packed teams started showing up.

That seems unlikely, since they retain SP and the skills they've already learned. At least, I certainly hope it's not the case, since I'm about to hit 20k to upgrade Sharena and I had her inherit skills from an extra Virion beforehand. Can anyone confirm?

Eh, offering the quests isn't really worse than not offering them. I sure won't complain about free orbs, especially the more reasonable ones. It's worth noting that one of the quests is an infantry version, which frankly seems challenging enough, especially doing it 15 times, but at least it seems like it should be possible for everyone.

Hmm, Ashnard makes an interesting tension. So far, while generic enemy fliers have all been pegasi, ally fliers have been pegasi = sword/lance and dragon = axe. But Ashnard kind of has to use a sword and have a dragon, so hopefully they break that pattern rather than choosing one thing or the other.

I'm really glad to hear about the arena matchmaking changes, since accounting for skills is something I've been saying it really needs in order to keep Inherit Skill from messing things up too much. And it might also help even matches between teams without inherited skills become more fair, since base stats already can be a plenty inaccurate evaluation of a character's effectiveness. Hopefully there will be some way to check characters' "score" under this new system so it'll be possible to keep telling which characters to use to maximize points.

The lava map is nice for having mages snipe enemies, but it's not so nice when you're fighting opposing mages. And it's especially obnoxious when the enemies your team fears most are mages. Like Nino. I didn't know about the maps changing with the season; that's neat.

Lloyd is last on the current list, so Linus is probably after him. Camus's absence is strange, but I'm sure he'll become available eventually, one way or another.

The skills in this game aren't random. In fact, while there's a ton of randomness about which characters you have and which ones you face, the combat itself in Heroes is far less random than in any traditional FE game. And while the game does have its issues, personally, I'd say the combat also works out to being a lot better than that of most traditional FE games.

Still no word on the 20 Orbs that are supposed to be available?

First day of the final round and it's almost at 10 billion points. Wonder if it'll hit 20 billion by the end.

If she's 3*, she's not from the banner, just a regular Nino pull.

Eh, I decided early on that I was going to use all my flags in the first two rounds because they wouldn't make it possible to beat Lucina in the final round or be much help getting a good rank when the teams were at their largest, and I don't think this would have changed that.

From what I understand, those are for the tournament as a whole. They're based on your cumulative score across all three rounds, so they'll only be awarded after the last round finishes.

There are actually a few earlier dancers that used swords: Phina in FE3, Sylvia/Lene (and Laylea) in FE4, and Lara in FE5. So those could work, just not really the FE6-10 ones. Now that I think about it, since Lara was also a thief, it'd make sense for her to use shurikens now, like other thieves. That'd be a cool spin on the dancer type.

Yeah, but all the colorless units have either a staff or bow or shuriken icon. It'd be weird to have a blank icon just for Ninian. It'd also mean that once skill inheritance hits, she'd be the only character locked out of an entire skill slot.

It's not so much a matter of "bad" as just "that isn't how this game works". Like would she have a blank colorless icon?

I'm not sure Ninian is the sort of character they have an easy way to fit into the game. All characters featured use some sort of weapon, even Olivia and Azura because that's how dancers in their games worked, but Ninian didn't. They could add a dragon transformation to her, which would be cool, but a dancing dragon could be a bit much.

I like how there's a lot more to this one than previous GHBs. The previous ones placed a lot of emphasis on surviving the first turn of combat and then were easy once you could take care of that, while this works a lot more like a conventional (but very difficult) map. Hard was easy for a lv40 team, but that's no surprise. Lunatic is a lot more challenging, though. f!Robin annihilates Ursula, but she's not very useful for the rest of the map. I tried using Merric, but not killing Ursula immediately becomes a huge problem. I forgot about trying Hector until I saw people mention him here; he seems perfect for this, so I'll have to use him when I get back enough stamina. I've settled on Olivia/Wrys/m!Robin for the other slots; m!Robin isn't great because the thieves do effective damage to him but I'm not sure I have any better options.

Just got a second Klein battle to finish his mission! Which isn't really significant since I already have more Great Badges than I ever really expect to use but still, I like trying to complete as many missions as I can. Klein is a lot of fun to use, too, and I love his art and voice.

Yeah there was a mention of some issues with the previous update, so that makes sense.

It's worth noting that that version of Excalibur was named "Gigascalibur" in the Japanese version: it wasn't supposed to be the same spell as the one Merric uses.