Talsian

Dondon, the 0% growth thing sounds right down my alley. How do I swing that on my machine?

Is the concern that you have four "tanks" on the beach but 5 spots to fill? (T hasn't showed back up yet) If that is your concern then maybe you could target sending the disposable yellow units out past the area where the hole in your wall is at to distract the laguz for a couple of turns till the BK arrives to plug that last spot.

Oh well, maybe it would be more obvious and seem less like a theoretical subject if Sothe were a little bit more of a capable fighter. As it is I almost feel like I'd need to go to easy mode and research to find a character Sothe could test this out on.

You know you have a sad sad skill when you'd seriously consider throwing a parity on him to keep him from accidentally leaving a slam dunk kill with 1 hp.

Well filler units on that level shouldn't even have a weapon equipped. The laguz will transform back to human and just sit there. No worries or experience drain there and less work for the healer. Much better than a resolve IMHO.

Well with Soren he hits so many caps so easily in the second tier he can max his weak growths EZPZ with a boatload of BEXP on normal. Actually, I'm betting that Zihark's issues against the laguz should be fixed with a Resolve.

Yes, but he does have a pretty cool trench coat. Soren faces the additional problem of being a magic user and that magic users suck by definition in this game. They give mages the advantage of special damage on certain foes, but then those foes rarely ever exist (except for Micaiah). I sort of wish Soren could at least kill Lyre and Lethe to save me the trouble.

Well the key to Zihark is having him kill things on the Player turn while having him do damage, but not kill things on the Enemy turn (so he doesn't take two attacks from tigers in a round). He needs constant monitoring of his enemy's health and switching from harder hitting (but non lethal damage, no silver or brave swords) to softer hitting chip damage. I'd bring a bronze, iron, and steel sword on him so you can switch gears. Bronzes don't do crits, which is very nice when a tiger is at half health and you are worried about getting an unlucky crit on the enemy turn. I'd also be leery of using that steel sword too much. Also his luck stat is abysmal so you'll want to stick a Fortune on him in the middle battle or he could take a fatal crit from the Myrmidon based enemies. It's true, he's a pain, but it can be done pretty reliability. When he's in the 3rd tier it's smooth sailing.

Between using Jill, Nolan, Micky, Aran over there it's not that bad. The trick is getting a feel of when to get more aggressive and what you can get away with. The cavalry units are pretty weak and couldn't even hit the ground if they fell off their horses. You can kill the first group before the second arrives. I use volug a lot and he is particularly perfect for weakening enemies without killing them from 1-7 on. But even if he does kill enemies, I don't really care. It's good to build his strike and often he is a long term character. Even if I don't start out the game planning to use him for the end, I still groom him as a possible backup for units that may have turned out badly. I don't normally level Fiona. I only did it the one time out of curiosity. Zihark is ok. You might have to keep him from biting off more than he can chew in his awkward early second tier, but after that he is fine. He certainly can handle 1-6-2 foes easily enough though. I'm not sure how that would slow you down. You could make most of the DB chapters go super fast if you use all the OP units they give you. I guess the thinking is that they will make the game hard but almost always give you an out if you get stuck. But then they make you pay the piper for your sins on chapter 3 if you abused it too much. It's a pretty cruel maneuver.

Oh, Sothe doesn't get any kills. If I remember correctly I had 4 kills with him the last game I played and I ended out wondering when that could have happened. He's just an evasion tank while other characters that I may be trying to level (like Micaiah or Jill) are standing in the back soaking up kills. All Sothe does is stand there, dodge, and shove others out of the way of ranged users. I generally only send Zihark and Volug up north. They can handle the few stragglers. I generally don't even have weapons in Sothe's inventory in the earlier parts of the game in case his inventory gets full from thieving and he has to trade with someone which of course would equip a weapon on him and he might accidentally kill something.

Not that it's a major point, but you could pull it off with an unequipped Sothe (you could throw a Resolve on Sothe if you're feeling paranoid) and a sturdy unit like Nolan equipped with a weapon next to him (you could put a shade on Nolan if you're feeling paranoid). I generally have Sothe up there unequipped with Tauroneo and Sothe gets the vast majority of the attacks and he can dodge enough of them to pull it off (assuming that Micky is in range with the A support). If I equip Sothe then almost all of the attacks go to Tauroneo, but Sothe does end up getting some kills and I generally don't like that waste.

I asked because I was thinking that Jon Snow was referring to Tauroneo as more of a long term character.

It seems pretty obvious but I didn't think about the Paragon + Blossom for Astrid. I've used it on Kurth before though. I don't think I'd do anything like this again anytime soon.

Well there's a difference, at least in my mind, between Fiona, who I can make something resembling useful and a character like Astrid. I've tried with Astrid and even up to a good level I still felt like she was a liability with poor speed, strength, and def. It's probably a lot easier in normal where there is a lot more BEXP to fix her stats. Tauroneo?

It's hard to go wrong with either warrior. Boyd's bio bothers me more with him getting hit. He can't avoid worth a damn. Boyd ends out at about 34 speed which does the job for the end. You might need a speedwing to fix it but just bringing him up to nearly leveling and the giving him a few points of bexp to level after hittin a couple caps does the job generally. Nolan has so many levels he gets more time to drift off course. But generally Nolan is pretty excellent.

Yeah under leveled units are a pain on hard. Not much else to say about that... I said I would not reccommend her for a casual game. The point is sort of a dead horse. Aran is difficult to fix on hard. There just isn't the BEXP to do it. I'm not too crazy about Nolan on hard either because ultimately it is hard to fix his strength. He has the same Str growth rate as Fiona. If we really want to get down to it Neph is the same. I actually like Boyd. Ike has so many chapters that it isn't too bad bringing him up to speed even in a casual game. I think Jill is the best DB unit if we want to go there, but every character is disposable. Fiona isn't great I never claimed that. If you get her up to speed she is the best endgame paladin, but that isn't saying much. She is like so many other characters in this game, you have to go out of your way to make them useful. It seems like the designers are encouraging boss abuse. Lol @ dr silent. Ok maybe I was a bit rude. Sorry about that. Maybe we could ratchet it down a bit.

Nephenee has the same hp growth and 5% less str. It was a challenge game.

How does the DB function if you have Sothe killing everything?

Not sure where to begin with that one. First off Fiona's growths are excellent. 45%HP 40%STR 15%MAG 40%SKL 60%SPD 55%LCK 55%DEF 50%RES Second you train them up in hard mode because it is boring using the same characters all the time. It's a challenge. And it is satisfying to create a pretty good character from the little resources you get on hard. I wouldn't recommend it for a first game, but this game is so old, I'm assuming that the people here have played it at least once. By this logic you'd never use any non royal laguz on hard because they are so hard to train to a high level with SS strike other than Volug and Kurthnaga. I don't understand this. To extend this argument to it's most absurd, why bother with Jill or Nolan when there is Carneighis and Giffca? Third, I laid out a strategy for each that gets them up to speed immediately without sacrificing the experience of others. Yes it takes time, but the point is variety. And really it's only about 10 minutes for meg and maybe 15 to 20 for Fiona. After that they are fine to use. A lance using Jill? Meg uses swords? This brings me to my fourth point, you focus a lot of the weapon triangle, which doesn't exist in hard. Lastly, the DB chapters should be about doing what you want and having fun, not leveling Nolan and Jill. I killed off Nolan and Jill on 3-12 when I had Jill rescue Nolan to try to go down and kill Sigrun (she's the general there). They both got swarmed and died after putting up quite a battle, but it was the most fun I had in the entire play through, so I think they both got used to their maximum potential on this game.

I agree that her growths do the job. I don't even care about her magic since she should be one shotting nearly everything. Sacrifice to bring her hit points low + wrath + 10% bond support bonus with Sothe + 9% crit forged tome = instant death to around 70% of opponents. At that point Thani almost seems redundant on armored foes. Sothe's only point in life should be to stand next to her, block choke points and shove her back out of range of ranged attackers... and then later she healbots.

Ok. I figured as much. Just an odd coincidence.

After numerous play throughs I have a theory that Michaiah's growths are altered by how you level her up. I believe that abusing sacrifice kills her speed. Am I out in left field on this one or has anyone noticed something similar? Along those same lines I've noticed that Mist's strength growth is abnormally high when she primarily levels by attacking things. Could just be a coincidence, but it seems to happen repeatedly.

Pain or Agony from 1-4. It would be nice for the DB to have a true laguz (not one with wildheart) on the team.

Almost finished with a play through right now with Fiona/ Meg as the featured combo of the DB on hard and neither is really a bad character per se. They need a lot of quick and early leveling which is really easy with Meg on 1-4. Just have her beat on a laguz at a choke point till he runs back to a healing pot... Wait a few turns, rinse, repeat till she is up to an acceptable level. The laguz give good experience and it goes quick. Much harder and more challenging is Fiona. What I did was forge a weapon with max might. Even then she needs 1 point of strength to damage the boss on 1-7. I had an energy drop on her just in case, but she got a level up with a point of strength, so it wasn't necessary to use. By the time she went through the forged weapon and another normal weapon, she was at 20 and a master seal finished off the tier. For 1-E her and Fiona had a much easier time taking on the whole level than a Nolan Zihark combo did on a previous game and Fiona and Meg's stats were just average for their growths. Meg is more sturdy than Nolan at that point in the game at the same level. At promotion with average stats Meg has about 4 less hit points but 2 more speed, 10 more luck, and 4 more defense which makes her solid enough that you don't need to bate enemies with an unequipped Black Knight on hard mode. Just leave him at the base unless you want the secret chacter. Fiona turns out to be the best paladin in the game between the highest speed (Astrid is the only one with a higher cap but she is highly unlikely to reach it without help) at 34. She has two very good innate skills and the Earth affinity which if combined with the numerous other Earth supports in the DB should make her nearly invincible... Eventually. Paladins are sort of crappy by definition though. Her only other real problem is that she's a major pain to get up to speed. Meg is ok too. She's basically an evasion tank, so giving her an Earth support does wonders for her. I think her and Nolan would make an excellent pair, helping to shore up Nolan's accuracy problems early on. She has the highest speed cap for a general which she gets to very easily. She can do decent damage. The fact that she also gets a mage-like resistance stat is nice, which should cap out easily at 32 which helps out if you decide to take her to end game. When she gets hit, she can take a shot. On average her unaltered D should be 34.25 for 20/20/20, by comparison Ike's caps out at 32 (yeah I know Ragnell adds 5, but still it's not too shabby). With a little babying and battle exp she should cap everything but magic. She doesn't need much. On average her stats should all be at or near their caps. For the end game, my personal opinion is that Meg is probably the best general, with 1 more speed than Gatrie and on average about 7 more resistance. Resistance gains importance in the end and outweighs the 1 strength cap advantage that Gatrie has. Meg even has an advantage in weapon type because I wouldn't mind giving an excess high level sword (alondite not vague kattie) to Meg while there is no way I'm giving the wishblade to Gatrie unless he is the only SS lance user, but normally they both should probably be wielding identical forged weapons. On my play through of normally disused units I'm surprised that I actually would use Meg again for a normal play through. She really shores up a weakness for the DB with survivability. (I dislike using over leveled units like toreano, sothe, and the black knight for my tanking) Fiona is actually pretty good when you get her up to speed, but is not worth the effort for a casual game. All this is a bit over the top, though the original post was amusing.