Othin

Heh heh heh heh heh! I do believe I've solved this little conundrum. So I think we can wrap things up here, especially as the conclusions are quite relevant. First off, I returned to Roy and Noire, leveling them up slightly in other skirmishes and then returning to Linde. Roy's increased levels decreased his Exp gains as a Merc and as a Merc --> Myrm, but his Exp gains as a Hero and as a Hero --> Merc were unaffected. Meanwhile Noire's Exp gains were always affected. This leads me to the first of my conclusions: Using a Master Seal clears all past cumulative levels and resets them to 20. I believe this change is permanent. For the characters that promoted during the test, it explains their Exp gains when plugging the resulting levels into the FE11/12 formula, as observed. Then there's the matter of Change Seals. As people noted, using a Change Seal causes the character's past levels and cumulative levels to be added together, then cut in half and rounded down to produce their new cumulative levels. If the resulting class is unpromoted, this is the end of the story. Then we have the matter of Noire, Jerome, and Unn. In truth, it is indeed a coincidence that they were children characters: they just happened to be the characters I used Change Seals on to turn them into Tier 2 classes. Their levels are another coincidence that masked the truth: their total levels are all slightly below LV40. This made it appear that they were keeping their past levels and simply getting an increase on top of that, but the truth is slightly different, as my second conclusion: Using a Change Seal cuts cumulative levels in half. If the resulting class is promoted, it then adds 20. This is why the changes appeared to be a slight increase, and it explains how the characters ended up where they did. Again, I believe this change is permanent. So in other words, those levels units build up don't actually lead to huge, permanent drops in their ability to gain Exp. You can cut down on those cumulative levels built up, to an extent, and they get cleared completely upon promotion, so like in past FE games, levels gained before promotion do not impact Exp gains after promotion. The difference is, you can keep unpromoting and repromoting units to manage their Exp gains. Their stats may get squashed a bit by the decreased unpromoted caps with this method, but I can confirm that stats lost because of cap constraints return when the character promotes to a class with room for their original stats. The one thing that seems off by a bit is Sol. He gained 14 Exp from the kill, but according to my calculations, he shouldn't have gotten more than 12. I don't remember everything I did with him or the exact levels he gained, but it seems odd. On the other hand, that's just if the scroll I used on him to turn him into a Demon Fighter actually functioned as a Change Seal. Thinking about it again, the Exp gains fit perfectly if the scroll actually functioned as a Master Seal - clearing out all the penalties from the 50 levels he gained in the process of becoming crazily powerful and just leaving him as a functionally LV23 unit with LV53 stats. This, I think, serves as a good example of how you can manipulate those mechanics to make endgame grinding easier, rather than just turning into the dull 1 Exp fest it had threatened to be. Might even be feasible in the main story without grinding to just make level gains faster, but I dunno.

This is true, as bizarre the results were. http://serenesforest.net/fe2/classchange.html According to this, the Demon Fighter --> Villager promotion has special rules, being the only one to decrease a base stat instead of just increasing it. So it sounds like it probably had to be set up purposefully.

You need to be LV10+ promoted to do that, or LV30 in a single-tier class. Otherwise you'll just have Tier 1 options available. Also, based on the above tests, my current hypothesis to explain some of the variation is that demoting from a LV10+ promoted class adjusts your total levels in a different way compared to demoting from a LV1-9 promoted class, such that the latter gives you a lower effective level and therefore more Exp.

Jerome as 10 Dracoknight --> 10 Dragonmaster: 10 Dragonmaster: 12 Exp Dragonmaster --> 1 Great Knight: 10 Exp Dragonmaster --> 1 Dracoknight: 30 Exp Dragonmaster --> Great Knight --> 1 Dracoknight: 15 Exp Caeda as 10 Pegasus Knight: 10 Pegasus Knight: 40 Exp Pegasus Knight --> 1 Falcon Knight: 15 Exp Pegasus Knight --> 1 Cavalier: 57 Exp Pegasus Knight --> Falcon Knight --> 1 Cavalier: 37 Exp Saria as 10+ Dark Mage --> 20 Sorcerer --> 10 Sorcerer --> 1 Sniper: 1 Sniper: 8 Exp Sniper --> 1 Archer: 15 Exp Velvet as 18 Taguel: 18 Taguel: 20 Exp Taguel --> 1 Dracoknight: 43 Exp Unn as 30 Manakete --> 1 Griffin Knight: 1 Griffin Knight: 10 Exp Griffin Knight --> 1 Dracoknight: 15 Exp Griffin Knight --> 1 Manakete: 15 Exp Alm as 21 Demon Fighter: 21 Demon Fighter: 15 Exp Demon Fighter --> 1 Dracoknight: 37 Exp Sigurd as 20 Paladin --> 1 Paladin: 1 Paladin: 9 Exp Paladin --> 1 Cavalier: 15 Exp Navarre as 20 Swordmaster: Swordmaster --> 1 Swordmaster: 9 Exp Swordmaster --> 1 Hero: 9 Exp Enemy MU as ~10 Strategist --> ~10 Mercenary --> 15 Bow Knight: 15 Bow Knight: 8 Exp Bow Knight --> 1 Paladin: 8 Exp Bow Knight --> 1 Cavalier: 15 Exp Bow Knight --> Paladin --> 1 Cavalier: 15 Exp Ogma as LV15 Hero: 15 Hero: 10 Exp Hero --> 1 Cavalier: 20 Exp Somewhere, something's not getting retained fully. But where? And what?

Yeah, that fits with why she lost one Exp as a Griffin, but the 5 Exp loss as a Draco seems like too much to explain that way.

This could fit, but how do we explain why Noire gained less Exp when she stopped as a Griffin Knight before unpromoting? Maybe it's different with promoted classes? It seems like when she just went to Griffin Knight, she was counted as just leveling up once.

Nono is a child, not a woman. Her supports make that clear.

Well, let's look at the possibilities. They're going to include Marth, so that means the Spirit Talisman trio with Roy and Micaiah. That also means featuring the 20 characters in those maps, two from each game, who appear to constitute the DLC lineup. So they have to translate those characters and show them to us, and they want money, right?

Or, to put it another way, FE10 had as little dialogue as FE9 in terms of sheer words despite the longer story, due to the lack of support conversations. Meanwhile FE13 has a ton of supports and an even longer story.

FE10 has 43 chapters. FE13 has 27 main story chapters, 17 sidequests, and a hell of a lot else with all the bonus maps, both free and paid ones. The free maps should effectively kick it up to at least 23 sidequests when they finish. If we're looking at it from a gameplay perspective of content, there's unlimited skirmishes, and the enemy SpotPass teams can function as more, unique skirmishes for getting the past game characters. If we're looking at the story and dialogue content, the huge number of supports adds a lot, compared to FE10 which had no real supports at all.

Uh, shit. FE13 is bigger.

Let's say we have Vake, a Berserker, and Serge, a Dragonmaster. Vake wants to move farther, so he moves up to Serge and selects Double. This temporarily combines the two characters into one. Serge gets huge Str and Spd bonuses, as the Berserker class has large inherent bonuses to those stats in Double and Vake's likely high numbers there increase them even more. So now Serge can fly around with Vake. She can fly up to an enemy and attack with her boosted stats, or she can fly up to the enemy and put Vake in front to have him attack with his boosted stats. Or she can just fly somewhere and leave herself or Vake in front without attacking. Either way, you'll only get one action for the two characters while they stay like this, and the characters have to move together, so maybe you want to just have Serge fly Vake to where he wants to go and drop him, separating the two and losing the bonuses but getting them back as two separate characters. Serge can also pass Vake to another character, or she could move up to another character, switch Vake in front, and then Vake would pass Serge to another character. Then that character might move and have Serge attack a different enemy. So you can use it a lot for movement extensions, but if you want the characters to move separately, you have to have them spend a turn to drop the character. Or another character could take the side character and then drop them. Either way, managing your characters in and out of Double is huge throughout the game. In just about every map, you should expect most if not all of your characters to enter Double at some point, even if it's just for the briefest period of time. It's just that useful, but you have to keep in mind the cost of shrinking your number of characters able to act separately while it's in use and costing actions to separate them. So there's a lot to think about, and it does a lot to change the way you play and increase strategy. Of course, what's worth keeping in mind is, it's powerful because you need that power. Enemies are very tough in this game if you try to fight them with the straightforward means you could use in other FE games. Or harass people into translating more.

If Double gets continued use in future games, FE13 will be this without a doubt.

Well, if you Double him with the right characters, he shouldn't have issues with getting doubled and can double some slow things. But yeah, his Spd is terrible. But it's worth using Henry forever just because he's Henry.

There are no shields against bows, although you can have her learn Bow Slayer to ruin bows' hit rates against her. I decided to go that route on my run, although she wound up behind for a while and never actually got to use it as a flier until postgame. Bows are a big threat, but you can work around them: being able to highlight the range of specific enemies helps a lot with keeping track of this. With the Double system, fliers are even more useful than ever before, but you do have to be careful. One thing you can do is have a foot unit jump onto the flier, then have the flier go where you want her and then switch to put the foot unit in front. Even if there are bows in range, they can then only attack the foot unit, not the flier.

Yeah, you lose the Exp penalty from promotion. I think that's just a class modifier that impacts the Exp formula as if you had an extra x number of levels (I think 15 is a closer estimate), so yeah, it goes away once you leave that class. When I "unpromoted" Sol to Demon Fighter, his Exp gains shot up. In fact, I don't even know how to explain how much his Exp gains increased: he's still the equivalent of a LV50 character, so even in an "unpromoted" class, he shouldn't be gaining a ton of Exp, but he is. Maybe the enemies are just functioning as even higher-leveled than I thought? Or maybe unpromoting in that way actually increases Exp gains. I decided to test this with Roy killing a LV13 Archer. He starts from base, as a LV11 Mercenary. As LV11 Merc: 37 Exp As a Merc --> LV1 Hero: 15 Exp As a Merc --> LV1 Myrmidon: 53 Exp As a Merc --> Hero --> LV1 Merc: 37 Exp As a Merc --> LV1 Strategist: 53 Exp (War Experience disabled) As a Merc --> LV1 Strategist: 79 Exp (War Experience enabled) As a Merc --> Hero --> LV1 Myrmidon: 37 Exp I'm not sure what to make of this. All data was collected repeating the same actions on Turn 1 of Linde's SpotPass skirmish, against the same enemy. He was in Double with this setup, and his Exp with War Experience changed as expected with that in mind - the question is how it got to 53 in the fist place and why it wasn't 53 when he unpromoted from Hero. This seems to show the opposite of what I expected. --- To compare, Donny as a LV2 Villager gained 67 Exp from that same kill. Gaia as a LV8 Thief gained 47 Exp from it. Neither one had ever used any class changes, but I'm still not sure what their levels really mean... Sol meanwhile as a ~LV50 character reclassed as a LV3 Demon Fighter gained 14 Exp from the kill. That's... pretty high for his level. I'm sure Demon Fighter is counted as an unpromoted class, but... LV53 unpromoted being near-equivalent to LV11 promoted? Something's odd here. --- Noire is a 10 Archer --> 15 Bow Knight. 15 Bow Knight: 10 Exp Bow Knight --> 1 Griffin Knight: 9 Exp Bow Knight --> 1 Dracoknight: 20 Exp Bow Knight --> Griffin Knight --> 1 Dracoknight: 15 Exp What.

Well, they largely reflect the classes' own base stat differences. Great Knight, Dark Knight, and Dragonmaster all seem to have slow Spd increases, while others like Swordmaster and Griffin Knight increase the stat faster. Also, Berserkers are much faster than Warriors. Spd stuff was the main thing I noticed just because of how important it is. Making Tiamo into a Dark Knight might be difficult, since she can't get swords in her normal classes and Dark Mages can't use lances. Your best bet would probably be to promote to Dark Pegasus, then to Dark Knight later in the game after she learns Lightning Speed, focusing in increasing her Tome rank during that time so she can fight competently without having to increase her ranks. She'll probably pick up enough Spd from her other classes to do fine, and Dark Knights are solid otherwise. You'll have to start from Bronze Swords for melee, though. Of course, if you just want a magic user that can be on the front lines, Saria is your best bet as she already is. She's fast, bulky, and powerful, and can heal with her Nosferatu spells. Easily one of the best characters. Henry is good, but he's much slower in exchange for increased Skl. He's good at using Ruin because of his increased accuracy, but he has serious issues doubling, and it can be hard enough to keep him from being doubled.

Actually, that might make things easier, if we could figure out the value of specific RNs in queue and use them to test specific stats. Would not be fast, though.

My point is, he could have done the same without Nosferatu at all. He was that powerful. And you can buy the tomes easily for less than 1000 gold each: I'm sure a set of five would have been enough to last the chapter. And yeah, enemy stats in this game get higher than in any other FE game: in terms of raw stats, they're even at their strongest relative to the powerful player characters, and this forces you to rely on tricks like Double to beat them. And yes, now that you mention it, you can get an unlimited number of Levin Swords if you grind that way, but it sounds a bit time-consuming - six maps for 25 uses? But yeah, that would be a good place for Weapon Saver. What I should mention while discussing this is that unless I was missing something, the rumor about easy Fame is a lie - you don't get huge amounts of Fame from the Gold and Silver DLC, if you get any at all. I don't remember where I heard about it, but it was my main reason for getting the DLC, and it doesn't seem to be true.

It's worth noting that Exp gains do not reset with level: they're still based on the total number of levels gained. Promotion also affects it, though: you gain less Exp as a promoted unit at the same total level.

Level resets whenever you use a promotion item. You could reach Falcon Knight by one of these two paths: Cleric 10 --> Pegasus Knight 10 --> Falcon Knight Cleric 10 --> Sage / Battle Cleric 10 --> Falcon Knight Leveling up as a Sage or as a Battle Cleric takes longer, but Liz is more effective in the meantime. On the other hand, if you reach LV10 in one of those classes, going all the way to LV15 gets you an excellent skill. Tome Expert isn't so useful for Falcon Knights, though.

You can actually get it higher than 50 with bonuses and/or character modifiers to stat caps.

It would take a lot of resets to get numbers reliably correct to the nearest 5%, and more to take class modifiers into account. No generic replacements, and I don't think they'd help much. This does seem like it may be our best hope for now. Although I can't say I mind things as they are.

That will likely take hacking the game to find out, and no one knows how to do that. I'm sure we'll get them eventually, but I don't think anyone knows when that might be. Unless you know of anyone working on trying to figure out how to work with 3DS ROMs and can get a progress report from them, but I don't know of any such people.