Othin

It records your highest score, not your total. If you get a chain of up to 7 matches, you keep adding the previous round's score to your own, so you can have a score of up to 7 matches' worth, but once you've finished a chain, your recorded score won't change again until you get a chain that beats it.

Brave isn't quite the right word. Brave weapons let you attack twice on your own turn: what Armads does is grant him the effect of Quick Riposte 2, which works on the enemy phase instead but only at high HP.

I think part of it isn't even about battle performance at all. Because his stat total is so high, he raises your overall team's rating, allowing you to fight higher-rated teams and therefore to get more points to reach higher rankings. I haven't found him challenging to fight at all, but he may be more powerful on the player's side than on the enemy's. When you're facing an enemy Hector, you can stay away from him until you've finished killing his whole team, then bait him into attacking a melee character so you can turn off his Armads double attack. But when you're the one controlling Hector, the AI can't bait you into unfavorable moves. As long as you can get him to the front lines, you can be the one to bait them into attacking him and getting annihilated. I was lucky enough to get my own Hector today, so once I finish training him, I'll have to see how he does on this side of the battlefield.

Regarding Merric's level of relevance to fliers teams, I've personally found him to be very effective. I might stop using him once Hector catches up, though, because using multiple green units seems unwise with so many reds around. I've heard good things about Cordelia's ability to take out enemy Takumis, so I'm inclined to agree that she's probably worthwhile for any fliers teams. Cavalry teams are probably the only ones with much promise, but at least fliers have more options than armors.

Ah, apologies for not paying enough attention. That's fair, then. I like to think of training characters and getting to try out all the cool stuff they can do as its own goal, but not everyone feels that way. Plus, a lot of the characters I arbitrarily trained up have been turning out to be relevant for all these new missions.

I've been playing for free and been able to do all the endgame battles just fine with the characters available. Maybe you just need to get better at the game if you want to beat all that stuff for free?

It also fits because Robin F, like Narcian, appears as an enemy in the story mode. Xander, Zephiel, Ursula, Camus, and Minerva's brother are the other story mode characters from past FE games who aren't yet available, so they'll probably all show up in similar Grand Hero Battles.

Yeah, and there was a bit of that with the Duel Attacks in Fates.

Was that a thing? I know it's possible to fight enemy Hectors with Wings of Mercy in single-player but I can't find any information on that having been available for playable Hectors.

Nah. There are a lot of characters, and even with grabbing pretty much all the available free Orbs so far, I'm still missing plenty of characters that might show up through those maps, and there are some I've just gotten through those maps and trained their 2* versions up.

That 7-3 Lunatic mission is brutal. I thought I'd be able to handle it, but it turns out I didn't have a single character capable of even damaging the Lance Knight. I'll have to do some training to prepare for that, but I'm working on the other weapon types first.

I said pre-Fates. I'm not comparing Heroes to Fates; I'm comparing Heroes to every FE game before Fates. Fates seems to be the point where IS really figured out how to make FE combat work on a level they'd never understood before. There's progress towards it in Awakening, but Fates and Heroes is where it all really clicked with stuff like the skill systems and the modified pair combat, and I'm optimistic that they'll keep applying those lessons to future FE games.

This game has far better combat than every pre-Fates FE. It's simplified in many ways, but it preserves and expands on the aspects that really matter.

We have a ways more to go of two free Orbs per day, but we only have 7 days left of the current Focus, so only 7 of those login bonuses can count towards summons within that Focus.

Yeah, Steel Axe has 8 Mt and Brave has 5. So if 4* Barst switched to his Steel Axe, he'd have more Spd and the same Atk as 3* Barst.

Heroes is a great game for the system it's designed for, and every indication is that the Gaiden remake will be as well. IS has really figured out how to make FE gameplay work lately: it's like they finally started figuring out how FE combat should work in Awakening and then perfected those ideas in Fates and Heroes. They're not going to suddenly slip back into mistakes from 25 years ago.

Yeah my understanding is that there's supposed to be five, released one per week. So the third one should be coming soon.

With 7 more days of two free Orbs per day and another special map offering six more Orbs coming soon (three on both of the two difficulty levels), it should be possible for everyone to get 20 more Orbs before the end of the event and do at least one more full summon batch.

You can't grind orbs, so once you've exhausted the immediate supply, you have to just wait for more to become available through maps or quests or login bonuses. I've been working on training my whole team while waiting for more. Aside from the unwanted duplicates I discarded, I've gotten my whole team to at least 3* and almost all of them to level 20+. (54 heroes total, with a few duplicates I kept for various reasons.) I might go for their remaining available skills after I run out of low-level characters.

Arthur's is the biggest one that bugs me. Jagen's also seems particularly odd compared to the others, but I actually like his style, so it doesn't bother me much. Odin's face in his default artwork is weird, but he seems alright otherwise. Most of the others looked fine to me given the level of cartoonish-ness of the game.

Had my low-level 2* Narcian gain a couple more levels and he kept gaining 4 SP instead of 6, so it seems like that's just the pattern: 3* and up gain in multiples of 6 while 2* gains in multiples of 4. I don't think I've ever used any 1* characters so I'm not sure if they get even less.

In every other Fire Emblem game, if a character dies, then unless you're playing Casual Mode in one of the recent ones, you lose them permanently unless you restart the map. In Heroes, you can keep playing and get them back afterwards, just without Exp gained from the map. This is much tamer than what previous FE games did, and I think it's quite a brilliant feature: you get a meaningful penalty, but not one so overwhelming that you feel compelled to restart. The only issue is that the penalty doesn't seem to be mentioned explicitly.

It's how they get money from it. It's annoying, but it also means they were able to put out a game you can have plenty of fun with for free, even if it means not getting the best characters.

Boon/bane seem to have a pretty predictable impact on level 1 stats.

I don't think there are currently any colorless effective skills. It seems to only be available through the Raven tomes, at least at the moment. But Raven plus Triangle Adept would be entertaining.