Othin

De-promoted Frederick would still retain 10+ internal levels, and his stats would suffer anyway. There's really no point.

This week, we got Armads. No surprise. We'll get either Nidhogg or the Double Bow as the next item in two weeks, and probably Holsety after that. The final two items aren't so clear.

What exactly are you asking with your second question?

I can't say this with certainty, but it's my understanding that while skills always stack with each other, they don't stack with themselves: you don't stack bonuses from two Strength Cries, for example. So the same should apply to those skills.

I can claim it, because it's true. Performance comparisons at equal levels don't matter when they won't be at equal levels. Pre-promoted units generally start with a substantial lead, and many of them keep it, at least for long enough to attain notable value overall. I won't say you know nothing, but if you're making such broad and wrong generalizations, you don't know anywhere near as much as you think you do. It's a common pattern: an FE player gets a bit of knowledge and starts drawing conclusions from it, usually including that very conclusion, when in fact there's far more to consider in each individual case. This isn't the place for this, so I won't discuss it farther here. All I'll say is, most FE fans temporarily end up with the views you're going through, then learn better by paying attention. I suggest you do the same.

Falcoknights have staffs and Speed Cry. Dark Pegasi really have nothing that will be relevant in Lunatic. Certainly not their pitiful tome rank that they'll never raise. And no, no such trend exists. Prepromotes are great, solid units, as they've pretty much always been throughout the series.

I personally found Tiamo far more valuable staying separate almost all the time to spam Speed Cry and help out occasionally with Rescue, although Elincia replaced her eventually. I also used Serge as a Griffin Knight to help with ferrying and occasionally jump on characters for a Move bonus. Frederick helped out in Double as a Dragonmaster once he fell behind in regular combat, although I ended up dropping him for the last couple of chapters. I also used various DLC units I picked up for Double support, specifically Leaf, Alm, Celice, and Eltshan: they all joined strong enough to help with that, but by the time I could beat their chapters, they weren't holding up well in combat. Although their maps get huge Lunatic bonuses, the characters themselves don't upon joining. Although Leaf and Celice had their own uses at times with staffs and Lightning Speed, respectively, and I ended up dropping the other two at the end. Flavia also ended up taking a mostly support role at the end; she couldn't hold up in combat as well as Basilio, but she gave better bonuses, and he needed those bonuses. But otherwise, yeah. Prepromotes you get in the main story become your main stars throughout the game, like Frederick, Libera, and Sairi. Other characters just have a hard time keeping up. But then, if you try hard enough and are willing to work hard, it seems like it can work out. If I can train Viole just fine in Lunatic+, I'm sure other characters can work out in Lunatic. Although FE13 Lunatic+ is probably the one mode in the series where Archer is a better class than Cavalier; as tricky as he is to use sometimes, I'm not training him for laughs.

It depends. Low weapon ranks can be tricky to raise, so Sages that promote from Mage will keep a strong preference for magic and play more like regular Sages, while Sages that promote from Priest/Cleric will keep a strong preference for staffs and play more like Bishops. Their frailty is definitely an issue, but I think that's more a matter of balance: having the ability to frontline with strong 1-2 range and support with staffs would have been excessive, especially since staffs can be so potent in this game with buying powerful staffs like Rescue and Physic as much as you want.

Extremely. In Lunatic, in particular, it's hard for many units to keep up combat-wise, so others get relegated to various support roles, such as staffs, Cries, and Double. You need good Double bonuses, but you won't have enough competent fighters to spare them for Double when you don't need to, so others make good substitutes.

Hmm. Looking it over, I guess it was based mostly on her Ronku support. The fact that she refers to MU as an alternative to marrying Ronku - regardless of MU's gender - sounds like an indication of substantial interest; even if it's difficult to draw conclusions, it's quite a bit of evidence. What's less clear is Sariya's level of interest, if any, in women other than MU. But then, despite having the potential to marry various men, even proposing to them herself in some cases, she doesn't seem to show romantic interest in them, either. Which could be interpreted in all sorts of ways, I guess. Hey, now we're actually talking about the supports. Looks like we've stumbled back into relevance! Apologies? What is this madness? Keep up the good work!

We can't know what the creators intended. All we can do is look at the evidence provided and speculate. Sometimes, people making speculations will be wrong. And I hope you're okay with that, because sometimes, people will be wrong even when they attempt to avoid speculating, as you're doing. People will be wrong; there's no avoiding that, and I hope for the developers' sake they understand that, because if they're so obsessed with their fans' speculations to be at all irked by this one way or another, then if they've worked on a few RPGs, the amount of "wrong" would drive them insane with anger. So with any luck most of them understand not to make a big deal about such things.

Because it's possibly true? It's quite clear that Heather is gay and Sariya is bi, and even though they're the most obvious, they aren't necessarily the only ones. Speculating about things not explicitly clear is something people like to do; perhaps you should get used to it.

...It's a parent-child support.

Ranged triangle weapons are pretty much the only solutions, yeah. You have to get rid of them fast, because if they have melee, you can't so much as equip a range 1 weapon around them without risking massive damage from your own attacks, but bows and magic won't do much to them, either. They're huge problems. The thing about the Cry skills is, you're not going to see that many skills showing up at random, since they're all in different classes. If you do the reclassing necessary to learn those Cry skills, it's going to be purposeful, and Skill and Luck Cry aren't ones you're going to want to bother going for unless you're just trying to gobble up everything.

You can work around Absolute Hit. In fact, it's the easiest one to work around: aside from Barbarians and Berserkers vs. sword users, enemies aren't ever going to be missing anyway. If you see all the enemies with Absolute Hit, throw a party and make sure not to screw up what's probably your best chance at victory. The real problems are Counter, Great Shield+, and Holy Shield+ - especially if the enemy has both Counter and Holy Shield+. And no, never use Skill Cry or Luck Cry if you have anything else you could possibly be doing.

The Slayer skills can give you a shot at dodging attacks from enemies without Absolute Hit, and in fact when I was fighting Fauder on my Lunatic file, he lacked most of the enemy accuracy bonuses and I was able to get his accuracy all the way down to 0% with Magicslayer Thunder, allowing Dion to use the skill. I'm not sure I ever actually had a character learn one of those skills; I think Serge managed to learn Lance Slayer at the end, but she had fallen pretty far behind and was mostly team support and ferrying; she didn't stand a chance in combat without huge bonuses. The accuracy could also be useful, but I didn't have many accuracy problems myself, either, except when facing an enemy with a Slayer skill of their own. I didn't manage to get the Killer Lance; for some reason I could never move fast enough to get the Thief. Not a big concern, though. As for Donny, I set up kills for him against a Thief and an Archer earlier in the map, giving him 100 Exp exactly. My team seems to be improving now. Viole got C Bows so he can use the Longbow, and both Derrick and Liz reached LV10 to promote, which all should make things easier. Liz also now has a Rescue staff to use to save Richt and Mariabel and for other utility, and I bought a second one from a merchant. Shame I didn't think to buy a third Master Seal while I had the chance for Krom, but I'm sure I'll get another chance soon enough. This time, since Liz promoted so early, I decided to make her a Sage. It's not that likely that she'll be able to help much in combat in the long run, but having an earlier start with magic gives her the opportunity, especially for a while. And the skills should be more effective. Even if she stops using magic by the time she learns Magic Expert, it'll still allow her to equip a tome to get a bonus on staff range and effectiveness.

In that case you'd lose 1 Luck from Velvet and 1 Spd and 2 Luck from Gaia, for no reason.

Everyone's Room has these random events that work like the shiny tiles: they either give a character a random bonus item, a +4 bonus to two random stats until the end of the next map, some Exp, or some WExp, or give some support points to a pair of characters. The thing is, the events are generated over time in real-time, so just by waiting long enough, you can get unlimited events without needing to progress in the game. It's obnoxiously slow at getting anything valuable, and the characters can't level up this way (they max at 99 Exp), but if you really wanted to trivialize a mode, it would work. http://serenesforest.net/fe13/everyone.html http://serenesforest.net/fe13/treasure.html#lost

MU still gets paired, but to a Gen 2 character to give Mark even crazier modifiers. The problem is that I bungled the Gen 1 pairing setting that up. Actually, I didn't, but sure, let's pretend I did. Although Ronku/Velvet would be better. Swapping Ronku for Gaia would mean losing 1 Spd and 2 Luck, while swapping Sumia for Velvet would just mean losing 1 Luck.

Not quite. First off, your formula is wrong. It's +1.5 Avo per point of Spd, not +1. Pair Sumia and Ronku and you'll have Cynthia with +7 Spd and +1 Luck. Then pair Cynthia with male MU with +Spd, -Str/Skl and Mark will inherit +11 Spd and +3 Luck. So he'll have 57 Spd and 48 Luck, which becomes 67 Spd and 58 Luck when you add Limit Breaker. As for bonuses, if you have an A support with the Swordmaster, you'll instead get +10 Spd and +8 Luck. This becomes +25 Spd and +22 Luck under the effects of Rainbow Cry, Speed Cry, Love Cry, Luck Cry, and Balumng, for a total of 92 Spd and 80 Luck. This grants a base Avo of 178. For skills, you can again get +5 from Charisma and +10 from Secluded Lady. Mark is using one skill slot for Limit Breaker, so that still leaves Axe Slayer, Lucky 7, Early Initiative, and Hot Start for a total of +115 Avo on the player phase. This puts the total Avo at 293. Actually, rather than Balmung, you'd want to use a Strong-Busting Bow, which grants +15 Avo against a higher-leveled enemy. Losing 5 Spd drops the base Avo by 8, but overall, it increases the total to 300. This all said, the Avo from skills is not displayed. So the highest displayed Avo on the stat screen should still be 178. Or more, if you toss out the Avo-boosting skills for skills like Spd +2 and All Stats +2, which would bring it to 185. Getting Luck +4 would require having Olivia as an earlier parent, which would hurt the Spd too much to be worth it. Actually, there are other bonuses available. First off, I forgot about the +20 from the support bonuses. But then there's temporary bonuses - +2 in a stat from potions, or +4 from Everyone's Room: they don't stack, so you could get another +16 this way, for a total of 336.

35, rather, counting the ability to have 20 bonus characters do anything. Not that you'd need that many.

In Normal and Hard, skirmishes have levels and stats based on the location where they appear and the strength of the enemies in the chapter at that location. In Lunatic, however, the skirmishes are determined based on your progress in the game when they appear, and they're set to be far stronger than the enemies in the current story chapter. Lunatic already pushes you up towards your limits with the story chapters as they are, so you're not going to stand a chance. The only ways to reasonably take on a skirmish without already grinding through DLC are to go after the limited number of ones that appeared a while earlier in the game, or to wait for the end of the game when the enemies have capped all their stats and you can catch up with postgame training. Both are far too limited to be feasible as main story grinding. There are a couple of other tricks you can abuse: unlimited Exp through Everyone's Room, hiring overpowered SpotPass characters, or just buying a stockpile of Nosferatu tomes. These allow for other ways to boost your team's strength that could let you get strong enough to catch up to the skirmishes, but it's generally stupid and a pain anyway. Besides, when you can't summon more skirmishes at will outside of Normal because Scented Boxes are too expensive, so you just have to wait real-time for them to show up, who wants to rely on them anyway?

Grinding in Lunatic basically requires DLC. You're not going to be able to grind properly with either skirmishes or SpotPass. And aside from the easy and unscaled Gold and Silver and Entombed Heaven, the DLC enemies are quite strong and will cause huge problems for weak characters.

Whether or not you skip the cutscene, everything relevant throughout the rest of the game indicates that it does happen; it is simply not displayed to the player.

Well, let's see. The two most feasible Generals are Frederick and Callum. Frederick would have 15 base Def as a General; Callum would have 16. So to get to 40 Def unboosted, Frederick would need to gain about 45 levels with his 55% growth, while Callum would need to gain about 34 levels with his 70% growth. (Their growths are unchanged from their base classes as a General.) Frederick is not going to gain that many levels. Callum might, but he's extremely difficult to train because of his severe Spd issues. If he could get that many levels, it's not going to happen until the very end of the game, so he'll still be far from 60. By stacking Defense +2, a Double with a 30+ Def General with an A support, Defense Cry from another General, and Rainbow Cry, you could hypothetically get +20 for a total of 60, but it's really not practical to set up all that. To be honest, I'm not seeing a use for more than one General on Lunatic, let alone three, whoever they are. And Rainbow Cry is a really valuable commodity: MU's Exp gains make him/her your more valuable combat unit, leaving little time for even using the best support move in the game. Although MU's kids could be more practical alternatives. Still, no matter what, you do all this and you get a unit who dies instantly to magic and still won't likely kill physical attackers faster than they kill him. It's just not practical.