Othin

Why should we care about it being an easy way? It works, and it creates a set of difficulty levels that are fun and challenging for different groups of players. As players, what more could we ask for?

There is no shame in backing up a bit and going through Hard first. I won't try to tell you what to do, but overall, you're likely to enjoy that outcome a lot more.

Laziness tends to have costs. I certainly would enjoy Lunatic+ more if the skills were distributed more purposefully rather than randomly. But even if laziness keeps something from being as great as it could be, it doesn't necessarily make that thing bad, either.

I've been a lot of places. If you've seen anyone with a similar name, they're probably me. Do you have a specific site in mind?

Have you missed the part where everyone supporting Lunatic+ has specifically said they don't reset for skills? Once again, if you're resetting for skills, it's because you didn't leave yourself enough room to deal with them. Don't blame the game for your own inadequacies. The difference between those who complain about Lunatic+ and those who don't is quite simple. Those who complain about it attempt to use Lunatic strategies and reset whenever the two skills enemies have won't allow it. Those who don't are those who make their own higher-level strategies to take advantage of the five skills those enemies don't have.

And you can only forge +15 crit onto a weapon anyway.

I see no issue with a requirement that you modify your tactics each time rather than trying the same strategy over and over and hoping it works. Nor do I see a reason to say that a brutal skill that requires thought and encourages otherwise unconventional tactics is at all poorly designed. This is not a matter of the game being poorly designed; this is a matter of you trying to use the same strategies you always have and whining when they're not good enough for a game with more complex enemies.

Hey, I get that the mode isn't for everyone. But I can't take complaints about it seriously when people complain about jacking up stats and then they complain about requiring fancier other tactics to take down enemies.

It's not just about face-tanking, either. If an enemy has Counter, you'd better have a way to fight them from range, and if they've got Vantage+, you'll be risking counterattacks even when you go for a finishing blow unless you can strike at the right distance to get around them. If they've got Aegis+ and you don't want to face a dramatic increase in their durability, you'll need a melee attack at whatever range their other skills will allow, and if they've got Pavise+, you'll want a bow or magic attack at that range. It's worth bearing in mind that the Levin Sword and related weapons still count as melee, so you can use methods like those to deal heavy magic damage to enemies with Aegis+. Basically, if you want to beat Lunatic+, be creative. When people complain about the mode, it's just because their strategies don't allow for the proper flexibility to beat enemies with different sorts of deadly tricks at their disposal.

Ranged attacks. If you just go with melee, or even physical 1-2 range, you'll have all sorts of trouble with skills that show up all the time, but it's very manageable if you prepare properly. Keep plenty of magic and bows around; I'm fond of Virion, personally, but others work as well. If you've got a lot of Renown and are willing to make use of it, you can get some great weapons, especially bows. Also, since almost all the DLC maps don't include the additional skills, they can be a nice break to work on improving your team. There's not much point in playing higher difficulties just to trivialize them by grinding on DLC, but one play per map won't hurt anything.

No.

There are five left unreleased at the moment, but I'm not sure how that makes anything "obvious".

Virion is one of the top units on Lunatic+ even without any special treatment just because bows are the best thing ever on that mode. If you're resetting to avoid Counter, you're not using enough ranged attackers.

Correct.

So like a cap of 1-2 of them? Well you've got to balance that against the birth defects.

If everyone keeping track of when the skirmishes showed up? It's my understanding that their stats are set based on your progress when they first show up, so if they stick around for a while, they can end up with lower levels than new skirmishes would have at that time.

What exactly do you mean by "not easy to obtain"? Without knowing that, it's impossible to tell what impact it would have.

Oh yeah, I misread. That makes sense.

Even without an excessively overleveled Avatar, I had much more trouble on Ch2 than on Ch3 both on Lunatic and on Lunatic+.

They kind of are. Vaike's Str bonus and Kellam's Def bonus in Pair Up are great to have when you have the space on your team, and while he's not as amazing as on Lunatic+, Virion is great on the higher difficulty levels for his bow access.

My usual route both on Lunatic and Lunatic+ is Ch4 --> Marth --> P1 --> Ch5, but yeah that depends on if you want to allow DLC. If you don't replay them to grind on them, they're a fun way of easing the journey a bit and giving you the resources to have a bit more flexibility in what you go for.

It depends on what you mean by "better". At this point, putting him through a third unpromoted class will just keep drawing out his time at rather low stats, but if you're going to go for it eventually anyway, it's still far better to go for it now than later. Promoting will just make him have to train in an unpromoted class later and with more internal levels, since it carries over a level increase from promoting.

In the first few chapters, when it's just Pass, Hawkeye, Luna+, and Vantage+, I noticed that Pass seemed to be on almost all of the non-stationary enemies; I gathered some data and noticed it seemed to have about twice the likelihood of showing up. I didn't pay attention for trends past that point, though.

I used it a lot originally, when I was playing it near-constantly, but nowadays, I tend to not get into it enough to be worth adjusting to and maintaining it.

Training Olivia isn't really necessary. While she won't be doing any fighting on the higher difficulty levels, her dancing is extremely valuable.