Redwall

Oh, sorry, I was mixing your argument up with Snowy's. Regardless, it is less arbitrary to ask the player to complete the game than to ask him or her to complete the game while opening chests that do not need to be opened. Do you agree? A lot of chests have no payoff in terms of helping your expected turncounts.

'leisurely' sounds innocuous enough

It is less arbitrary to ask the player to complete the game than to ask him or her to complete the game while killing enemies that do not need to be killed. Do you agree?

Yeah, in my playthrough, Chrom got the C8 Energy Drop and both the C6 and C13 Secret Books. Still a bit Str-blessed, but I guess that was made up for by my Avatar being Mag-screwed. Hmm, I'd expect EXP to be scarcer in this run than in mine since you're skipping all Paralogues besides Morgan's, and since you don't have Galeforce for those extra player-phase kills. Slightly more turns will be spent in C20 and C21 compared to a run with Galeforce, allowing for more EXP in those chapters, but generally I'd still expect EXP to be hard to come by.

I'm fairly sure the support bonuses don't work in the back, given how many resets I had on Grima when using Chrom. Not sure about Outdoor Fighter. And it would seem I made a mistake in my previous post: GL Lucina gives +9 Spd, and not +7. I guess my reliability concerns can be dismissed.

Hex and Anathema can combine to make Grima's Avoid go down by 25, so I don't think Hit is too big a problem (though it remains an issue). Reliability-wise, I think a slightly bigger (though not really that big) problem is doubling Grima w/o Rally Spectrum. Griffon Avatar has 10 Spd at base. +2 from a tonic +4 from a Rally Spd +7 from a reclassed Great Lord Lucina That leaves 27 Spd to be gained, and 25 if the Avatar takes the Speedwing. I did some back-of-the-envelope calcs just now and found that an Avatar w/ 50% Spd growth (which is short-selling, but I wanted to keep the math quick and easy) who gains 52 levels has about a 70% chance of gaining the requisite Spd. So I guess you'll probably want to lean on the Avatar to a larger extent that I did to boost the odds of getting to the 50 Spd threshold.

What are your reclassing plans for Lucina?

Morgan's ability to catch up is something with which no one disagrees. In my efficiency playthrough, Morgan caught up by like Chapter 24; in Chiki's LTC, Morgan caught up within a few chapters. If you're going to argue in terms of turns saved, the Avatar still wins by a landslide.

Great. Neither is Olwen.

I don't disagree, but that doesn't preclude a belief that there exist contexts in which Dark Knight can be helpful. He believes Ricken is more often useful as a Sage than as a Dark Knight, but that a Dark Knight can be more useful on occasion. There's nothing wrong with that. That was in response to bearclaw's claim that "[Ricken's] still worse at [Rescue-spamming] than most other rescuers, he's possibly surpassing Lissa but she has it for longer so that's pretty meh." While I respect people with differing opinions as to which characters and playstyles are the "worst" (subjective), it can objectively be shown that Ricken is a better Rescue user than Lissa upon imposing the (arbitrary) ruleset that is LTC: simply consider the lowest possible TCs with and without Ricken, if we otherwise do not impose any character restrictions.

Good heavens. -Olwen used "lol" exactly once in a way to which no one could have taken any offense. Seriously, I actually Ctrl+F'ed through seven pages of this topic. -Yes, Olwen believes Ricken is one of the better units in the game. So what? He brought up specific contexts in which he believes Ricken to be useful, and brought up the possibility of Dark Knight which you and Reggie conveniently ignored. (BTW, in HM LTC, Ricken is a much better Rescue user than Lissa and Maribelle, and unlike Anna doesn't cost any turns to recruit; remember he also has good Mag growth and the Mag+2 skill) -At what point did Olwen say Rescue was the best thing ever? He has claimed that Ricken and Rescue are among the better options in the game, and nothing more. If you actually read carefully, you will note hasn't compared them to Veteran or Galeforce. -Olwen has clearly stated several contexts beyond LTC he considers to be challenging. I see no reason he wouldn't consider something like a no-Second-Seal run (which, btw, would cement Donnel as the worst character) to be worth considering for competitive purposes. He said exactly one thing that could be construed as belittling (pg 1), which I suppose is progress for him. You otherwise have no case.

You know, the voice-acted grunts that occur during support and story conversations. My favorite is Lucina asking "But don't you see?"

You can just forge some Hit onto a Bronze Lance for Donnel to improve reliability in his join chapter.

Donnel; Virion is one of several options for early chip damage (useless in Hard, somewhat useful in Lunatic), and Ricken can either turn into a Rescuebot (Hard) or serve as a +4 for your Rescue users (both Hard and Lunatic).

Although everyone is usable, you really don't want to have a large team. Having a smaller team allows you to concentrate a large amount of EXP onto select units, which is important since much of the legwork will be done on the enemy phase (unless you're Rescue-skipping every level or something).

I'm not disputing that, assuming this is in reference to my claim about self-consistency. At the end of the day, however, we still prefer self-consistent models when possible, like quantum mechanics, over ad hoc explanations like the Bohr model. If this is in reference to my claim about falsifiability, then, uh, that doesn't address my comment at all. I don't dispute, for example, that I can take some set of assumptions for granted while testing some hypothesis X, with the goal of testing X and only X. At the end of the day, X still has to be falsifiable in principle. No one's disputing that it is arbitrary to impose a requirement in a LTC tier list asking the player to, well, LTC. There's no truth to which set of criteria are "the best," but it is generally preferable to avoid more arbitrary things than we need.

...how is Beastbane winning? You guys realize that the *bane skills are locked to the Taguel and Manakete classes, right (the latter class being much more useful as a lead combatant in almost all cases)?

First of all, it doesn't; for example, in dondon's FE7 LTC, he used Oswin up to and including C20. In my Awakening playlog (which probably could have been done more quickly by a better player, but...), I used a Knight for multiple stages for his high defense. There are plenty of ways to get use out of characters. A completion tier wouldn't *just* be a join-order list, but it would be extremely heavily influenced by join order, moreso than even the current tier lists. The reason is that if you're killing every non-reinforcement enemy as you propose, even units with low bases can catch up quickly due to soaking up so much EXP. The consequence is that early-joining units with low bases become comparable in combat prowess to the Seths. You ignored the majority of that snippet, and you didn't address my core argument. I'm not claiming anything to be fair or unfair. I'm saying that you're imposing more arbitrary criteria than you need to. Tier lists are necessarily arbitrary, but that doesn't mean we should impose more than we need. It is less arbitrary to ask the player to complete the game than to ask him or her to complete the game while killing enemies that do not need to be killed. Do you agree? I understand, but you need to propose something self-consistent and falsifiable. From what little I remember of your FE9 (or whatever game it was) tier list, you assign scores to things that aren't measurable. Does this not bother you?

It's not just that; it's that the more we strip away the unique qualities that characters have, the more they look the same, and the less interesting it will be to tier characters. Tiering characters becomes more of an exercise in favoring availability much more than anything else...which is fine, but which is also much more arbitrary than simultaneously allowing for things like movement, bases, availability, and other utility to be accounted for. I'm not claiming anything to be fair or unfair. I'm saying that you're imposing more arbitrary criteria than you need to. Tier lists are necessarily arbitrary, but that doesn't mean we should impose more than we need. I have not seen a brisk-play or LTC tier list that mandates the player to defeat every non-reinforcement enemy. I'm confused as to what you're complaining about. No one actually spends a great deal of time learning others' strategies unless they're trying to set turncount records or something (and even then, I suspect that those people try to figure things out themselves). Additionally, the highly-ranked characters I've seen tend to perform well (in the context of the game, obviously, and not any hypothetical maps we can conjure up) regardless of who their teammates are. If a tier list ranks characters according to how well they do x, the only thing we can account for in that ranking is that character's relevance to x. It sounds like you propose something more...ambitious?

If we remove the brisk-play directive, movement and bases barely matter, and the game begins to feel more like a RPG than a SRPG since we'll invariably favor enemy-phase combat over carefully planned player-phase positioning. Additionally, the brisk-play directive does prevent bad characters from steamrolling, and even prevents good characters from becoming overkill, provided the player abides by it; this allows for cleaner comparisons of characters. I don't think we shouldn't penalize players for needing effort or thinking since this is ostensibly a strategy game.

i pair characters based on hair color, this merits a new option imo

Yeah, your Avatar can actually double Barbarians with a Chrom Pair Up. You should have a fighting chance in even the worst randomizations.

The most popular tier lists don't tier for LTC playthroughs at all. They simply ask you to play quickly, something that doesn't require nearly as much forethought. It is necessary to have such constraints to make the differences between characters apparent, lest we farm reinforcements and get Nino to 20/20.

+Def/-Lck or -Skl allows you to feed a lot of kills to the Avatar in Prologue and C1. A high-level Avatar can take a lot of pressure of Frederick in C2 and beyond. I suggest you have a look at the playlogs of Walhart and/or Interceptor if you have tried this and are still having trouble. Yes.

Palla's HFFA. But I have bad eyesight so it's no big deal.