Othin

They can do that too, yeah.

Definitely. There are more improvements to be made but it's a great start. Bronze weapons are pretty weak but if you have enough power, they can be nice to have on hand for the extra accuracy or if you want to be sure you don't take a crit. You have a bunch from earlygame that will never break because weapons don't do that anymore, so unless you need to sell them you can just keep them on hand for any characters that have inventory space. Iron is pretty basic, all-around solid. Steel is great when the penalties don't matter and bad when they do. Killer is a good substitute for Iron; it has as much strength and minimal downsides, and increasing crit damage from 3x to 4x can actually be relevant. Silver is hard to use but if you need the damage you'll be glad you have it. Be wary of enemy phase when using Silver; if you get into a few fights you'll rack up penalties that will stay noticeable for a long time and that power drop will tempt you to keep relying on Silver to make up for it even though it'll just keep getting worse later on if you do. Thrown weapons are balanced now; they're much weaker than before but they still have their uses, especially when you can use them to set up a powerful Dual Attack since that option can really make it important to hit from a specific spot. Just be aware of the penalties. It's odd that the B rank thrown weapons are range 2 only but they have such a huge power boost with virtually no other downsides. I generally prefer them for their player phase effectiveness even though they don't have the universal effectiveness on enemy phase; thrown weapons are much more a player phase thing than enemy phase now. Kunai have much more taken over the past role of thrown weapons; they're VERY effective even if you don't need the debuffs. You can also just use magic, or magic weapons, or the ridiculous personal weapons Ryouma and Marx have. That's the other thing, personal weapons are REALLY overpowered; I'm not quite sure what they were thinking on that front. Ryouma, Marx, Takumi, and Leon will rarely need any other weapon, but at least the weapon selection matters for other characters.

Some of the buildings can be pretty helpful, more than just +1 to a stat.

I'm confused about them. Is it like +1 to that stat's cap for whoever is affected?

Of the fundamental changes to FE gameplay since Thracia, the biggest was Awakening adding the Pair Up / Dual Support system and the second biggest was Fates revising it to Attack Stance / Guard Stance. Even though it's just a revision, it's still bigger than anything from the seven FE games before these two. It changes the way battles work to something fundamentally unlike anything ever before, even in Awakening.

Yeah there's a slew of improvements. I'd say Awakening and Fates have both expanded FE gameplay more than any other FE games in the past 15 years, despite issues in other areas.

For Extravagance, you spend the coin as part of the attack.

Any child unit can access White Blood by having Corrin as their parent, and from what I understand that means any of them can buy Hoshido even if Corrin isn't their parent.

Cameos don't have to be necessary to be okay.

From what I understand, Archanea fits the description of the land on the other side of the Dragon's Gate. It isn't spelled out explicitly but it seems likely, and I think some stuff in Shadow Dragon also suggests it? But it's a loose and speculative connection for sure.

Would it even need to change form? They could have the weapon access tied to the character, not any of their weapon ranks, so they could use it even if their class couldn't normally use that weapon type.

The Awakening DLC doesn't seem usable for training, but the skirmishes look fine even on Lunatic.

There are definitely some "strictly worse" things like Snake Venom, although the thing is that if you have a strategy built around using one skill you could also benefit from related ones as seen with enemies that will stack Snake Venom with related but better % damage skills. And yeah the other routes don't seem to match up to the really well-placed skills even on Nohr Hard. The DLC has some, and maybe the other Lunatic modes will have something to show too but I haven't heard anything about them having cool enemy skills.

Is there any reason to go fast? I ended up taking 38 turns just chipping away at the opposing teams. Regardless of any character stuff, the actual playing it seems pretty boring. And it doesn't seem to affect the rest of the game at all, no Exp or items or anything?

Again, not confirmed that you can access them with just the free DLC; I believe currently it's not even known how to get to the menu. But yeah there's some bonus menu Vincent found that seems to have the Witch and Ballistician items on it and appears to be linked to DLC in general somehow so it does not appear that they require a specific download like Dread Fighter and Bride did in Awakening.

Eternal Seals have been known and available for a while, just not especially understood. They're also very expensive and only available late in the game.

You didn't pay for Witch or Ballistician or any other locked content. So far, no one has ever made a purchase under the belief that it will give them access to Witch and Ballistician. If you pay for the base game, you get the base game. If you pay for the base game plus bonus content, you get the base game plus bonus content. The bonus content doesn't belong to you as part of buying the base game just because it's on the cartridge any more than unused content belongs to you just because it's on the cartridge. If Nintendo left that content off the cartridge and only made it downloaded through DLC, none of us would be any better off; the only difference is that it there would be problems with PvP between people with and without it. It's also worth bearing in mind that Witch and Ballistician do not appear to be tied to any specific DLC so much as being available based on playing a lot of DLC, so there may not even be any possible specific download they could've been added as part of. So it only works if they're distributed as part of the base game. I'm not sure how to actually access the menu where you get them, but I'm thinking it could be possible to even get them without any paid DLC at all, just playing the free one a lot. Hard to complain about that. And yes, I'm not defending the story. THAT is something where, to my understanding, content people could've reasonably expected to find in one of the base games was instead made available only through bonus content. But that's a completely separate issue from the gameplay content and your bizarre (but common) claim that it being on the cartridge is somehow a problem.

All four Amiibo classes, as well as Dread Fighter and Dark Falcon. All of which seem to be obtainable through multiple means, so leaving them off the cartridge would've just been a big unnecessary hassle and also would've caused them to not show up properly when people without the downloads fight your team. Plus, it's not like it's a new thing for FE games to have unused or otherwise unavailable content. Past games have had plenty.

I guess past a certain point your Exp gain stops going down from leveling up, at least with Eternal Seals.

There's no basis for that kind of entitlement. The companies don't owe you anything more than what they promise you; their job is to deliver a good game with enough content that earns its price and satisfies what they promise. There's cause to complain that the story stuff isn't delivering as promised through the base game, but not the gameplay content. The devs gave me what I paid for, and it's an excellent game. I'd say they're treating me quite well.

It seems that on the DLC scale, the story mode qualifies as about a 0 star. That doesn't mean the scale isn't an accurate measure of how different DLC maps will compare to each other at a given point in the story. 1 star does not mean "easy". It means "easier than 2 star".

I don't think that's the way to look at it. 1 star doesn't describe raw stats levels of the DLC enemies anymore; it describes how their strength relates to how strong your team is expected to be based on your progress in the main story, which seems relatively consistent at least at a specific difficulty level. All DLC seems to scale this way, and I think Paralogues do, too.

I've been wondering, what happens if you're level 80+ in a regular class like Trueblade and then use a Dread Fighter Scroll, which increases your level by 20? Does it work like capped stats where you just sit at level 99 and then go back to your old level if you use a Parallel Seal or equivalent item to return to a promoted class?

There's nothing scummy about it. Game companies have no obligation to offer everything they could cram into a game by release under a $40 price tag. They could've made other things like Witch and Ballistician available in the base game, but there's no reason to believe they would've actually made that extra stuff beyond what already constitutes a full and quality game without the chance at extra compensation for it. As far as we know, all the content that requires paying extra is content that only exists because the DLC sales will pay for it. The fact that it's included in the base game's data just makes distribution easier and ensures it functions properly in PvP. None of this is any cause for complaint; it doesn't make us as players any worse off than any alternative we could reasonably ask for.

The classes are included on the cartridge because they're not tied to specific downloads, and the Lodestar and Great Lord classes are available free anyway. There's nothing wrong with the practice; it just makes things easier.