That all depends on weapon triangle status as well as the enemy group faced (bows are 2-3HKOes). Anyway, consider that Lyon wins durability before Syrene rescues anyone, and then wins it even more when she does. That means Syrene is trading an advantage (assuming her turning to Garcia level can even be called that) for a disadvantage.
Bad durability =/= bad offence and besides, the team being frail earlygame plays more into Lyon’s healing advantages than Syrene’s ability to weaken stuff instead of outright killing it.
Maybe I’m not hammering home how useless this softening tactic really is.
Base level iron axe!Garcia has 16 att, enough to 2RKO most enemies he comes across (he does 59% damage to brigands per hit, for instance). Brigands only 3HKO him, and most other enemies 4+HKO, so he can be safely replace Syrene as an E. phase weakener in most cases.
The same can be said of base level steel sword!Franz (15 atk). Once he starts doubling consistently, he can switch to iron or slim weapons to leave the enemy with maybe 10-20% of their hp in tact, which is better damage output than rescue!Syrene.
Or take Gilliam. His main issues are low move and lack of AS, but on the combat end of things, he has no trouble 2RKOing (more base str than Garcia) or surviving (the same brigands 4HKO him even after WTA).
In fact, there aren’t really that many units on the team who fail to 2RKO enemies, so the main issue behind this whole weakening tactic is how well one can survive. Fortunately, earlygame is full of forests and forts to boost avo and def, and enemy density is fairly low to start, so this is hardly an issue.
I may sound like I’m flipflopping on this whole earlygame-units-have-trouble-surviving point. The intricacy here is that our earlygame units can survive well enough to pull off what rescue!Syrene is doing for 1 turn, but not durable enough to do it for multiple ones, which is where Lyon’s healing kicks in.
A bit of a random point, but even Lyon’s phantoms can pull off this weakening tactic pretty effectively. According to this, a lv 1 phantom has 9 str (1 more than Garcia) and 34 base avo. Enemies range from 80-90 hit right now so the phantom is only facing a ~50% chance of death per atk, 18% if the phantom is on a forest. Assuming the latter, there’s a 64% chance that phantom will survive 3 consecutive attacks and essentially do the same thing that Syrene is. Talk about the little phantom that could, and we have a potentially infinite supply of them.
As opposed to Syrene taking those counters. The healing demand is going to be roughly the same, and if the enemies distribute their attacks instead of ganging up on one unit, that dramatically decreases that chance of anyone dying.
Where in your example did you specify anything about this? This is what you wrote in your opener.
However, what Syrene has and Lyon doesn't is the option to not kill enemies, by rescuing a unit and reducing her Spd to 7-8. Even if Lyon rescues someone else, he still OHKOs with his 29 base atk with Flux. This allows Syrene to beat enemies within an inch of her life so that some weaker unit like Franz can pick them off.
There’s nothing here indicating that you can’t send one of your units into these enemies’ attack ranges. I suppose you could send Syrene ahead of your group and injure everyone she pleases. However, remember that this is robbing other units of atk experience, which makes up roughly a third of the total experience an un-promonted would be getting assuming a 1:1 ratio between attacks and kills.
Something I hadn’t considered in previous posts was in showing various ways in which Lyon’s amazing offensive efficiency positively impacts the team’s overall CEXP gain. The main one would be that Lyon doesn’t ever need to be deployed to retain his offensive effectiveness, whereas Syrene does. Why does this matter? I can have a unit take Lyon’s place for any amount of time I please, and so that unit can directly thank Lyon for any CEXP he/she gains. Whereas Syrene can weaken tons of enemies, something most of your cast does proficiently anyway, Lyon can allow your team to develop a whole extra unit, while only being used himself when called upon.
Another one would be Lyon purposely going into combat with only staves equipped, or perhaps trading his weapon to someone else for a short period of time. Sure, those 3 enemies wouldn’t even take damage, but they’re also not attacking any other units, which means we can nab those 3 kills on player phase distributing exp any way we want. Of course, this would only be used in situations where injuring/killing those enemies on E. phase wouldn’t be any more efficient than killing them the following P. phase, such as in a defend map or where most of your units need to move fully just to attack the enemies, which isn’t terribly different from them just moving fully. Syrene could do the same, but then she might need to get herself healed, whereas Lyon isn’t taking damage.
Then there’s Lyon devoting himself mainly to healing and summoning, but I don’t think I need to re-iterate the numerous advantages of that.
Not necessarily. If I can get 3 attacks on an enemy instead of 2 and still move those 3 units more or less fully, then no efficiency was really lost. Or let’s say we’re on chapter 5 (kill boss) and Joshua is in range of an arena, but not the boss. Having him visit the arena isn’t costing me any turns. So again I re-iterate, It is always easier to farm for exp than it is to kill enemies proficiently.
Lyon can be rescued while the flier re-moves to one of the spaces on the wall that the fighter cannot access. Next turn, the flier moves up one space, drops Lyon and re-moves 6-7 spaces in any direction. If there were an archer there instead of a fighter, then the flier would’ve simply had to have waited a space farther than usual, which still gives the flier 5-6 move after Lyon’s dropped.
The spider isn’t even going to show up, no less threaten the kids before the chapter’s long done. Anyway, look at all the terrain in this level that can be bypassed with ferrying.
That would matter if the pirates weren’t so heavily immobilized by water travel (apparently Jesus walks pretty slowly).
I have the cursor on a spot where a flier would be safe from any attacks, and the water west of that spot is almost entirely clear of enemies, making it very safe travel for people carried on winged creatures.
While I’m at it with this picture show, let’s show some examples of places where ferrying Lyon is undeniably effective.
Again, the cursor is on a spot where no enemies can attack. Lyon can be dropped right below the village and proceed east.
Bypassing that mountain cuts off ¾ of Lyon’s travel time in this level. From where the cursor is, the flier would only need to move a single space to be able to drop him.
Dropping Lyon onto that island allows him to OHKO all 4 of those heroes (they have 46-49 hp + res to Lyon’s 50 atk), all enemies that Syrene cannot ORKO without a crit. In addition, there are many other islands and a mountain that Lyon can bypass if he’s ferried.
And now for our final exhibit:
You yourself mentioned this gap when talking about bypassing draco zombies, so not much needs to be said there.
I also left out some obvious examples like the desert and the chapter 20 canyon, but by now you should get the point. Ferrying is a plausible way to transport Lyon that heavily cuts into Syrene’s only major advantage in this match-up, which is her superior movement.
That all depends on what point of the game we are in and what enemies are available to Vanessa after dropping Lyon. If Vanessa cantoes to a group of soldiers after dropping Lyon, she’s obviously being productive. Then post promotion Vanessa is a very competent attacker (steel lance!Vanessa has 28 atk/18 AS with 2 B supports, enough to ORKO scorched sand cavs and double some myrmidons), so she definitely isn’t cantoing away from enemies, but rather towards them. Either that, or she’s dropping Lyon after moving fully since now they can both be in a large group of enemies without anything to fear.
That happens to be one of only 3 FoW maps in the game. Also, Colm gives +5 vision so if he’s sitting say 3 spaces from the frontlines, you’re only going to get 2 extra vision out of him. That isn’t really doing much in terms of detecting threats.
If you want to be that particular, just give him a Kyle C/B instead.
No, the argument is that Colm is comparable to Gerik, a unit that is demonstrably good at melee. All that I established was that Colm isn’t dead weight on the battlefield, so giving him support bonuses isn’t a 1-way deal like supporting Tethys is.
It’s not just dying in one round she needs to be worried about. As she accumulates hits over a chapter, her need to heal gets increased, which is another thing that cuts into her movement lead over Lyon.
Lyon only resorts to using flux when it is advantageous, such as if he’s fighting a group of enemies that all contain enemies he can double.
The problem is she can only finish off brigands because they 2HKO her, meaning if she attacks one on player phase, she’s toast on the enemy phase counter. She has to either use a javelin that butchers her accuracy, or wait for someone to catch up and weaken the enemy for her, something that happens after Lyon has been ferried.
Rescuing and dropping only takes up 3 whole phases (player + enemy + player), but as I said before, brigands and archers severely limit her offensive opportunities in the first place, so it makes very little difference. In fact, it’s worse than that:
-Vanessa can’t attack an archer or brigand directly because she’ll very likely die on the E. phase counter.
-She can’t attack a brigand with a javelin if another brigand is in range because she risks 2 E. phase counters.
-She can’t risk attacking thunder mages until lv 7/0 since they have have a 1-2% chance of OHKOing her with a crit.
-The above also applies to mercenaries.
She pretty much can’t attack anything safely without it being set up for her, which again requires that units catch up to Vanessa. Suffice to say, there is a huge net gain from having Vanessa act as Lyon’s personal chauffeur.
Sure, as Vanessa gets better, she’ll be less and less willing to chauffeur Lyon around. However, other units get introduced to your army (Tana, Forde, Kyle, etc) and Lyon only needs 1 high move unit to carry him around. Also, there are many situations where there are no enemies in range on a given turn. When that’s the case, nothing is lost by having a paladin/flier rescue Lyon while another unit takes and drops him in the same turn. It’s possible for Lyon to move up to 11 spaces in a single turn doing this. Video demonstration.
0_o huh? Lyon isn’t eating spaces on the map when he’s rescued.
You’re acting like Syrene’s presence on the team alone heavily reduces the amount of healing that is needed, which doesn’t make much sense. For one thing, Syrene can’t both be a resue tank and have high avo. She only has 28 avo when carrying someone, which comes out to 52-62 display hit (54-72 real) against her before weapon triangle consideration, so she’s bound to be taking damage. Conversely, we could set Syrene loose and let her solo earlygame maps to reduce the amount of healing needed by a significant amount, but then as you said that would hurt the team in the long run.
Looking at this from a mathematical perspective, we’ll suppose we have 8 units in play and we’ll make up an average healing demand coefficient of 5 (1 being min, 10 being max). Now suppose Syrene’s healing coefficient is only 1. If I swap an average unit for Syrene, the average changes from 5 to 4.5, which is only 10% lower than when she wasn’t there. Even if Syrene’s injection to the team were given triple weight, the average would still be 3.5 (30% lower). If a lot of healing was needed before Syrene was around, a lot will still be needed after.
From a healer’s perspective, it’s better for multiple units to take chippy damage than it is for one unit to take a load of damage since that increases the staff exp pool. So if Syrene is going crazy with her high move and killing enemies before they even reach the remainder of your party, you’re not only hurting other units’ CEXP gains, but also hurting Natasha/Saleh/Lute/Artur/etc’s SEXP gains, so there’s really little opportunity for team growth in what you are proposing.
Don’t get me wrong. Syrene having the ability to reach enemies before anyone else can is undeniably an advantage she has over Lyon. However, she has to at least tame that ability somewhat for any reasonable team growth to occur since the rewards of having a developed Franz/Vanessa/Kyle/etc is too good to pass up, especially for rout maps. And again, Lyon has ways to offset that movement advantage such as warping units, getting ferried and using summons to extend his range.
There’s 5 enemies that start near the Draco Zombie, and they don’t move unless someone’s in their attack range.
Even if the 2 bottom wights are killed, that still leaves 3 attackers to finish off the person who took the Draco Zombie counter.
We agreed to call him Moustache Monster© :D
Even assuming this were true, an elixir is a pretty bad alternative to just letting Lyon physic you. They are very rare (Serenes doesn’t even list any under “item locations” or “chests” so I can’t say how many there in fact are, but I’m guessing maybe 3 sets), only have 3 uses, take up a slot and can be sold for a lot of cash. There really isn’t any reason to use them unless a unit is in a pretty desperate situation.
Why do you always assume a phantom dies immediately? I experimented with them a bit and it turns out each phantom that Lyon summons is lv 14, meaning that the level of the phantom corresponds to that of Lyon himself. For one thing, that changes one of my points about earlygame I’ll correct here.
A bit of a random point, but even Lyon’s phantoms can pull off this weakening tactic pretty effectively. According to this, a lv 14 phantom has 16 str (4 more than Syrene) and 50 base avo. Enemies range from 80-90 hit right now so the phantom is only facing a ~30% chance of death per atk, 8% if the phantom is on a forest. Assuming the latter, there’s an 83% chance that phantom will survive 3 consecutive attacks and essentially do the same thing that Syrene is. Talk about the little phantom that could, and we have a potentially infinite supply of them.
Come to think of it, these phantoms are actually better than most of your units, at least before they start promoting.
Franz lv 20/1 (steel lance): 26 atk, 108 hit, 7 crit, 16 AS, 46 avo
Phantom lv 14 (killer axe): 27 atk, 113 hit, 35 crit, 11 AS, 50 avo
That’s downright hilarious, a phantom that can actually compare offensively to a promoted Franz. Lyon can now be in 2 places at once since his phantom can last many turns before facing a truly significant chance of death, and even if it dies, Lyon can just summon a new one to repeat the process.
Essentially, this means I was wrong about phantoms being able to 2RKO enemies effectively in earlygame since they actually 1RKO everything (11 AS doubles just fine at this point). However, this just about eliminates Syrene’s movement advantage altogether because:
-Lyon can make a phantom to slow down, or even completely wipe out a set of reinforcements. In fact, phantoms can pull a Jesus (walking on water), so they can even chase down pirate/brigand reinforcements, which gives you more time to visit villages. If Syrene waits at a reinforcement spot, she’s obviously not putting her high move to good use.
-If your team splits in 2, Lyon can have his phantom follow one group while going in another himself. Even with +2 move and flying, Syrene cannot usually beat out an extra player phase.
In addition, Lyon and his phantom take up 2 spaces to Syrene’s 1, meaning they can better clog chokepoints, make longer extended walls to guard your backliners, etc. Moreover, the point about phantoms drawing dangerous attacks away from your units is amplified since they can do this on a regular basis. For instance, shadowshot!gorgons only have 32 hit on a lv 20 phantom, and shadowshot!mogalls only have 26. I believe you said at one point that gorgons/mogalls come in huge groups, with as much as 8 mogall reinforcements appearing in the final. It only takes 2 gorgon/mogall attacks to kill most units in your party, meaning they pose a death risk on those units no matter how much their high avo might minimize that chance.
Supposing those 8 mogalls can’t all be killed on P. phase, let’s see what our phantom is doing for us.
Tanking 1 hit: 100%
2 hits: 74%
3 hits: 54%
4 hits: 40%
5 hits: 29%
6 hits: 22%
7 hits: 16%
8 hits: 12%
It might not be the case that all 8 mogalls have shadowshot, or that they all reinforce in the same place, but the point is that phantoms are very likely to survive past the first attack even in endgame, which makes them very effective at being bait, no less killing some enemies for free.
I can’t believe I’m reading this. Are you seriously arguing that triangle attacks are useful on generic enemies?
Where to begin…
-Triangle attacks are only possible once all 3 fliers have been recruited, which can be as late as chapter 10 Eph route. All phantom related goodness is available as soon as chapter 1.
-All 3 fliers have to be in play. Syrene and Vanessa I can grant you, but Tana has a very good chance of not being in play. Without going into too much detail, she has severe offence and durability problems when she first joins (poor hp/def, weak to bows, lack of con makes her lose tons of avo with semi-basic weapons) and has an awful affinity (wind doesn’t give any durability boosts she desperately needs), which alone is enough to make her a below average unit.
-Why on earth are Vanessa, Syrene and Tana in a V formation? Both fliers support Syrene, so they’re more likely to be in an | or --- formation.
-If an enemy managed to enter the pegasis’ V formation on enemy phase, that enemy would at least be injured to the point where one of them can pull off a 1HKO, so the 100% crit is completely superfluous.
-If you form a V formation around an enemy on player phase with the last flier activating the triangle attack, then we have to be talking about an enemy that is 5-7HKOed for that triangle attack to not be a complete waste. The enemy probably died at the hands of the first peg player phase attack, and if it didn’t, then 2/3 pegs are taking counters anyway.
-The enemy wouldn’t get stuck in the V formation if he/she has 1-2 or 2 range.
Triangle attacks may be cool, but their practical value against generic enemies is about as high as the protective value cheese would have as body armor.
Perhaps I should’ve phrased that differently. Healing cannot simply be considered a luxury, it doesn’t do justice to its value throughout the game. If staves didn’t exist at all, units would have to life off of vulneraries/elixirs/fort regeneration alone, which is a pretty decisive blow to an army’s efficiency, especially in lategame where both hp and damage are inflated. What’s a luxury is something like a silence staff since you gain very little from getting 3 sages to lose their ability to attack.
Having to send a unit adjacent to a lord unit as opposed to anywhere they want, as well as costing their player phase turn is quite a bit to lose in a single turn. It’s also something that can happen a lot more commonly than you’d think. 5 slots is not nearly enough to supply everyone with steel 1/steel 2/hand 1/ hand 2/killer/reaver/vulnerary/spirit water/armorslaying/dragonslaying/horseslaying/etc.
That was a pretty fun and very difficult debate. Though, when it all comes down to it, purple hair wins the day.
