Vykan12

@the fliers video: Damn, you take so many unecessary risks it's hilarious, particularly how you were using Florina after she fell to 1 hp, but otherwise, well done as always. On a slightly unrelate note, got this done. Red Dragon 1RKO compilation Just have Sacred Stones left to go, can't wait to take out that oversized donkey kong in style :P

Edit: Removed video.

Hard mode is generally assumed, I don't see any need to break that convention.

Sure, go ahead. I'll only reply if you make some mention of Haar's eyepatch in the opener :P

@Nathan: Nothing happening right now in my other 3 debates so I might as well be like Mekkah and have like 10 going at once. How about FE10 Haar vs Reyson?

Hard to say, but in HM Klein is definitely > Igrene since they'll have similar bases but Klein's growths are superior, plus he has more availability. Wolt and Dorothy are below average at least for a good part of first tier, so I don't see them in contention. So, Igrene on NM, Klein on HM, though I'm leaning more towards Klein.

How would you get the exp rank in an S rank run with lords only?

There's at least 10 classes that can ORKO Idoun. Even more against Fomortiis (since Sacred Stones has overpowered legendary weapons) and the Red Dragon (thanks to Filia's might). And of course, good job Rolanmen. Shortly after I calculated who could pull off a 1RKO on Idoun (we're MSN buddies in case that isn't clear), he basically made all those videos in a matter of days. I also like his FE7 mage only and lord only endgames, so that's worth checking out as well.

AKA a lawyer/politican who recites Shakespeare vs just some chick with rly long blue hair Bastian and Lucia both suck. Not only do they participate in the least amount of chapters aside from Geoffrey, Ena/Nasir and the Royals, they also have arguably the worst stats of any member on your permanent team. So, undoubtedly using either of them will likely drag down your combat efficiency, so they’re mainly being fielded for supports and cleaning up. In terms of supports, Lucia only has Ilyana, Janaff and Bastian. Lucia being able to support Bastian is not a point against him since he benefits equally from it. As for Janaff, there’s almost no way he’s being fielded this late in the game since high spd, low att laguz like him and Lethe are complete fail because there’s no strike level gains in this game. So, while even buff people like Muarim are struggling to keep up offensively when silver weapons start to show up, Janaff is starting to become utter crap. This leaves the loli girl whose constant hunger leads to many humorous sexual euphemisms. But nope, Ilyana has Gatrie, Mordecai and Zihark as much, much better alternatives, and only needs to pick 2 of them for Lucia to be left in the dust. Although Gatrie isn’t that good, if he’s fielded he’s got no one better to support since those don’t help his main issue, being spd and bad movement, and Marcia and Astrid probably don’t want Gatrie, leaving him with Ilyana and lolShinon. Mordecai is kind of the same thing (win att and def but lacks spd) but he likes how fast that Ilyana support is (only 8 chapters for an A, and they have common availability as soon as Mordecai joins) and would want Ilyana > Stefan anyway since heaven gives crappy bonuses. His only other options are Mist which is a given, and Ranulf and Ulki, who are pretty bad units, so fielding both Gatrie and Ranulf/Ulki is very unlikely. That leaves Zihark, who supports Ilyana, Brom and Muarim, but although Ilyana isn’t his best option, Ilyana still has a good shot at a B since there’s always the chance that both Brom and Muarim aren’t fielded, or one of them already has a support set with people not including Zihark. All this to say that Ilyana has better options than Lucia and all those options are pretty available to her, so the odds of Lucia x Ilyana being available is slim to none. Thus, Lucia doesn’t net ANY of her support partners, and since that’s pretty much all she’s being used for, that’s pretty fail. Bastian, on the other hand, has a slightly more ideal support situation. He’s got Makalov, whose only other option aside from Astrid is Haar, so there’s an extremely good chance that if Makalov is fielded, then Bastian is filling in his B and thus helping out one of the game’s better units. Lucia, again, isn’t worth mentioning since she benefits from it as much as he does and them getting deployed at the same time is a hilarious waste. This leaves the most interesting option for Bastian’s A, Volke. First of all, Volke’s ONLY support is Bastian, so he doesn’t have any competition to worry about. And before you say windxwind is pretty fail, recognize that Volke’s durability depends mostly on his avo, and an A Bastian gives him +15 avo, so ir’s far from useless. Plus, the support is amazingly fast, as a C takes effect immediately and A is reached in a mere 2 chapters. But this begs a few questions. Why is Volke being fielded? Easy, the farther you get in the game, the more valuable the chests become, as do some of the steal-able items. If you don’t believe me, think of how many more stealable physic staves there are in the lategame than there are before the Serenes Forest chapter, or compare chapter 11’s chests to those of chapter 27 (lol resolve vs a statue frag or a javelin). Thus, Volke is likely to be fielded a lot in the later chapters of the game based on thieving utility alone. The next question is, why the hell is he fighting? Okay, sure he’s kinda bad at fighting when you first get him, but he gets quite a ways better as the game goes on, particularly when stilettos show up. When you think of a chapter such as 23 (the one with Ena as the boss), you’d rather Volke could take out the enemies in chest rooms by himself rather than needing assistance and slowing people down from reaching other enemies, so there’s definitely an element of wanting Volke to be able to handle himself vs small groups of enemies that don’t get in your main group’s way. Case in point, Bastian giving that +15 avo to Volke > Lucia not doing anything for anyone. There was one last thing I wanted to mention. Part of why Bastian and Lucia fail at life is because their durability sucks, so you’d want their enemy exposure to be minimized. This bodes heavily in Bastian’s favor since he can attack at range whereas Lucia has to always risk getting hit to damage the enemy. This is another thing that contributes to Bastian x Volke too. Since they are supporting, they should be close by, which means Bastian is following Volke in his thieving duties. This is good since Volke isn’t exactly perfect in combat so Bastian can finish off whatever Volke left alive on player phase, which could mean something like Volke being able to open a chest instead of using an elixir. Lucia, on the other hand, isn’t supporting anyone, and doesn’t make for a very good finisher since her atk is horrible and she depends on sheer # of attacks to kill an enemy (doubling = 2 hits, crits turns a hit into 3, giving her adept also gets more hits in), whereas Bastian may only execute one attack, but it is a fairly damaging one since his mag is ok and he can target res. Oh, and he can use stuff like fire vs laguz, thunder vs wyverns, etc more easily than Lucia can get access to longswords and the like. Managed to make this tl;dr somehow but to conclude, Bastian > Lucia because of supports and having a more useful means for doing chippy damage.

Lucia vs Bastian sounds fair. You up for another match, Tino?

My point is, calling him passable disregards that Sothe has one of the worst endgame performances out of any unit in the entire game. The only units who are arguably worse are Mist, Saints, low availability mages (lol Pelleas and Tormod) and a couple other losers. Yes, there’s no denying Sothe is usable in 4-E, but you can make anyone usable with the right strategies, so it means little. Negating a +15 def tile means more damage to Lehran than with Nihil, since +15 att > +2-3 from supports and maybe hit bonuses. But others can do it much better than him. Say I use Tanith. She can reach the mage enemies on the left or side of 4-E-1 before anyone else and kill them all on enemy phase with a javelin, then next turn she can take out a bolting d00d with a forged silver lance and canto over to where the mean general enemies are. And all this is from a unit who’s not even considered that good. Or I’ll take Mordecai. If he has 28 spd, he can ORKO almost any general unquestionably and laughs at physical attackers. Again, maybe only a mid tier character and he’s outperforming Sothe everywhere in 4-E except maybe 4-E-4. Killing enemies w/o dragonfoe > needing it to kill competently. Though what’s worse is dragons are hard as **** to kill without mastery activations since red ones have 70ish hp and 30ish def, which makes dragonfoe a skill that’s heavily competed for. Deploying Sothe probably means not deploying a dragon, which is really bad, especially if you have a good deal of units with canto or 1-2 range since then you can spam tide bonuses for longer.

If Sothe is passable with those flaws, then almost anyone is. Hell, even Lyre or Nealuchi might be comparable to Sothe in 4-E since their rend/tear activation alone is ~51-64% in 2 hits, and other units not known for having a good endgame like Kieran and Brom could easily beat him because of WT control (wyrmslayer and hammer access ftw). There's only 2 available, and parity is better used on someone trying to take down Lehran because he is on a +15 def tile and can activate corona.

Yay? Bane is the worst mastery in the game, it has an activation of skill/2% while most characters have skill% or speed% as their activation, or in the case of paladins, self-healing. But d'oh, Sothe landing bane means he doesn't kill the enemy if he activates it on the last hit, meaning it can actually hinder his ability to kill enemies more than it helps. Baselard doesn't help him either. Having a 28 str cap means you need like a 22-26 Mt weapon to kill anything competently, but the baselard is only giving him 18 if my memory serves me correctly. Sure, it gives him 20 crit (or was it 15?) but that's hardly helping him considering how high enemy luck is in this game. Sages and snipers are pretty weak, even Mist w/ alondite can probably kill them. Same deal for spirits pretty much, the only thing that makes them hard to kill is having enough spd to double, but that's heavily mitigated by brave weapons. Also, I'm pretty sure Sothe cannot ORKO spirits on def tiles while some other classes either can or have ridiculous proc%ages (lol Naesala with adept/tear has ~80ish to >94% chance of killing the enemy if he can't ORKO them).

Two I can think of. 1) Deploying bad units slows you down. Sothe, Sanaki and an untrained Kurth easily fit into this category. 2) You can't deploy everyone. For instance, 4-E-5 has 19 units available and only 17 can be deployed, so 2 people are biting the dust even if you like max deployment.

Anyone who can double consistently makes good use of adept. 1RKOing actually. And Volke w/o adept probably still beats Sothe with it since he not only has higher caps, he also has at least 25 more crit than he does because of his nice innate skill set. Stillness also helps him be less of a prime target than Sothe, and no one really wants a skill that takes up 25 skill capacity anyway, but I digress. Big whoop, having that happen is an 8% chance assuming he has capped stats and neutral biorhythm. That would be pretty stupid since Sothe is a terrible combat unit in POR and is hindered by tier 1 caps anyway if you decided to baby him.

Getting anyone into top 5 like that isn't too hard, you just need to solo the game with a few characters you kill off in the final chapters and feed your herons kills. Pretty easy with something like Elincia mercy + heron w/ daemon card.

I never looked at Kyle vs Forde too seriously, but I'm not sure why you're mentioning Colm A. Forde has Kyle, Ephraim, Franz and Eirika as support options. They're all reasonably fast supports (high base points and 3 growth except for Eirika which is 2), then 2 of them have the same affinity as Colm and another has fire, which gives most of the same benefits as light (atk, crit). So I don't see how Kyle is at a support advantage. He has Forde, Ephraim and Lute which are pretty fast, and Colm who is slightly slower, but that's only 1 more option really. I guess we could get into how viable Kyle's support options are compared to Forde's but it's mostly overlap and I don't feel like going tl;dr unless necessary.

I don't have anything new but someone I know from the IGN boards does some pretty crazy things in this game which are worth some attention. Leanne with all stats maxed except str Leanne showing up 1st in the unit records. 250 wins 0_o And some more proof that she actually soloed every chapter with Leanne wherever she was available. http://s67.photobucket.com/albums/h296/Kim...rrent=FE003.jpg http://s67.photobucket.com/albums/h296/Kim...rrent=FE004.jpg http://s67.photobucket.com/albums/h296/Kim...ent=FE009-1.jpg She also claims to have gotten Lethe to lv 40 in 2-2 and seems to like abusing Vika a lot, and claims to have done things like getting Brom to gain a sword rank in 2-1. That is possible in case you're wondering... you just need Brom to disarm an enemy, Heather gets the steal and Brom gets in a couple skirmishes with his new weapon.

I’m not sure if it’s appropriate for me to critique people’s arguments this way or even at all (don’t you have to enlist to be a judge?) but here’s some random stuff I felt like pointing out. From Taylor Swift’s side Proof plz? Wth? Joshua is one of the game’s better units. Tino did, however, address this argument rather thoroughly in his next post. No, being the worst unit means that unit is most likely hurting team efficiency. Even if Neimi might not be costing you turns, she’s taking up a spot another unit could use better and thus allow a slightly easier completion of the game. Plus I would contend that her not being able to counter in addition to being statistically inferior to everyone else is in fact slowing you down because of the protection/babying she needs. Not needing to use walls and other enemy impediments > needing them. Working around Neimi’s suck doesn’t make it go away. Is Garcia suddenly amazing on player phase if Tethys dances him every turn? Anyone can do that and obviously getting kills normally > needing them fed to you. Do you think someone like 4 move Amelia is not a hindrance to efficiency if we completely cater to her getting kills? Helping out has no intrinsic value, as you could use another unit to help out better, or not replace her slot and thus allow everyone else to gain slightly more exp per chapter. From Tino’s side What makes you think that? Enemy stat growth in this game is pathetic, the enemies in the desert chapter have like +1-2 stats > those from 5-6 chapters earlier, so Garcia’s bound to be able to double some things, especially as a hero. Moreover, he’ll have enough ATT to 1HKO some stuff, then there’s the existence of crit rates, loldiers, brave weapons, etc to help him out. I dunno, I just get the impression you’re basing Garcia’s performance on your PE rather than judging him a bit more objectively. Now I can’t help but feel as though you consider units to be worth using if they have “endgame potential” seeing as what matters is how a unit performs over time and there needs to be a greater reason to tolerate a unit’s suck. Not only that, you don’t really show whether Garcia’s endgame is bad or not or whether Ross is actually superior overall. The last sentence is meaningless since it has nothing to do with the comparison nor does it say anything precise. It’s as though you saying “this is why Garcia fails and Gerik doesn’t” and then say “in addition, Gerik doesn’t fail”. I dunno what the point of this is. Saying Gerik is 2 while Garcia is 1 is implying that Gerik is twice as good as Garcia, and will then become 4 times as good, which is quite the exaggeration. You could’ve just made your point by comparing their growths or directly comparing them later on. ============================================ So overall, I think Tino did a slightly better job, mostly for the reasons Mekkah already stated. On a side note, all that talk about supports kinda gets aggravating to read, particularly the “Garcia is fielded” “no he isn’t” “yuh huh” business.

I'd be willing to defend Elincia in her vs Tibarn. Also, I just finished my reply in the Gerik vs Artur match-up and I'm still waiting for Tino's reply for the Nino vs Rath match-up.

You are presuming Arthur is good when he joins, but I dare assert he’s only average at best. Artur lv 2/0 (lightning): 19 hp, 10 Mt, 8 spd, 2 def, 6 res, 2 lck, 18 avo Colm lv 3/0 (C Neimi, iron sword): 19 hp, 10 Mt, 11 spd, 3 def, 1 res, 8 lck, 32 avo Eirika lv 7/0 (C Seth, rapier): 20 hp, 14 Mt, 13 spd, 6 def, 4 res, 9 lck, 37 avo Franz lv 5/0 (iron lance): 23 hp, 16 Mt, 9 spd, 7 def, 2 res, 4 lck, 22 avo Garcia lv 5/0 (C Ross, iron axe): 29 hp, 18 Mt, 7 spd, 5 def, 1 res, 3 lck, 22 avo Gilliam lv 6/0 (steel lance): 27 hp, 20 Mt, 4 spd, 10 def, 3 res, 4 lck, 12 avo Neimi lv 3/0 (C Colm, iron bow): 18 hp, 12 Mt, 7 spd, 3 def, 3 res, 5 lck, 21 avo Ross lv 5/0/0 (C Garcia, hatchet): 18 hp, 11 Mt, 4 spd, 4 def, 1 res, 10 lck, 18 avo Seth lv --/1 (C Eirika, brass knuckles): 30 hp, 15 MT, 12 spd, 12 def, 9 res, 13 lck, 39 avo Vanessa lv 4/0 (iron lance): 19 hp, 13 Mt, 10 spd, 7 def, 6 res, 6 lck, 32 avo Artur has one of the worst durabilities on the team. Out of the 10 mentioned units, he’s tied for third worst hp (19), claims the sole title of worst def (2) and has the second worst avo. If that weren’t enough, his crit evade is horrible. If enemies have so much as 3 crit or higher, Artur starts running the risk of getting 1HKOed, something that can’t be said for any other unit in the army except maybe Vanessa vs bows or something. So, Artur has arguably the worst durability on a team that is already pretty fragile, seeing as how Gilliam and Seth are your only tanky units in the earlygame. Our curly haired monk isn’t winning any awards for his offence either. He’s tied with Colm for the lowest attack power on the team (aside from Moulder, but he has staves), but lucky for him he targets res, right? Oh wait, every monster in his joining chapter has 0-3 def and 0 res, so the def-res gap is tiny. Though, knowing how pathetic monsters are in general, I also checked the stats of the human enemies in the next chapter and it’s largely the same story. In fact, I only managed to find one enemy who had 4 def, but also had 1 res, so aside from the boss, the def-res gap can safely be considered less than or equal to 3 for a good portion of the earlygame. Probably Artur’s only redeeming factor is his 8 base spd, which makes him more valuable than trash like Ross, though it’s still far from outstanding, as he only manages to beat Garcia and Neimi (and Ross) in that department. And even then, Garcia can turn to a steel axe and do almost as much damage in one hit as Artur can do in 2, and Neimi gets a good deal of crit from her lightning fast Colm support, and Ross grows at a million miles per hour, so Artur is not even close to outclassing who he manages to beat, if that. In other words, Artur is majorly sucking, and sucking <<<< not existing. Since I hopefully made it pretty clear that Artur is more of a hindrance than a help, at least around his joining time, I’ll focus on his supports now. Artur’s supports are problematic for him. First off, they grow too damn slowly, particularly in counter-acting all those problems that Artur faces that I outlined earlier. Lute: 15 turns for a C, 35 for a B and 62 for an A Neimi: 19 turns for a C, 39 for a B, 66 for an A Tethys: 25 turns for a C, 55 for a B, 95 for an A Cormag: 29 turns for a C, 59 for a B, 99 for an A Joshua: Same as Cormag Artur joins in chapter 4, and the game is 20 chapters long. Assuming each chapter took 12 turns on average (which is a lot, IMO), that only gives Artur 192 turns in which to grow supports. Then, assuming units can only be adjacent to each other ~50% of the time (again, I consider that rather high), that leaves Artur with 96 turns in which to build supports. That pretty much rules out A Joshua, Cormag or Tethys happening, and most of his Bs are only happening past midgame, probably in the chp12-15 range. So that leaves Lute and Neimi for his A, which is by no means a good thing. Neimi and Lute have about the same durability as Artur, which means Artur needs another fragile unit fielded to gain those support benefits. In addition, Neimi never really becomes more than a decent unit, so her being in play alone is questionable. Oh, but there’s more. Artur isn’t even a favourable support option for Neimi. Since she can’t counter for all of first tier, she’d rather not get attacked on enemy phase, so an attack support is far more favourable than the defensive bonuses that Ice gives. Moreover, Neimi has Colm, Garcia and Amelia as faster supports, along with Gilliam for another alternative option, all of which give both attack and crit that Artur doesn’t. Joshua already has high natural avo and decent defence, while having slight damage problems, so it makes sense to give him A Ice B Thunder than A Ice B Ice. In addition, Gerik gives Joshua full crit bonuses, and the only other support that Joshua gets crit from is L’arachel, so he definitely wants to boost that stat as much as he can. There’s no offensive bonuses being put to waste. Gerik could’ve supported someone else and given them attack, but that other person could’ve probably gotten attack from yet another different supporter, so there isn’t really a negative here. Plus, even if one assumes Tethys is questionable for support, I don’t see any issue with A Saleh B Joshua as an alternative, or even Innes (not as bad as you make him out to be). And using Tethys for defensive bonuses is not hurting efficiency, it will merely take effect in less situations. Eg/ Gerik is in a couple enemies’ attack radius but Tethys isn’t, though she’s still within 3 spaces of Gerik and had danced someone on that turn. Getting Gerik and Tethys to end adjacent to each other while still making use of Tethys’ dancing would admittedly be trickier than the average support, but thankfully their support has an insane growth rate (30 starting value, gain 4 points per adjacent turn). 14/0 is a bit steep, you’re giving Artur >1.7 levels per chapter when it’s likely closer to 1.5. Though, admittedly, reducing his level by 1-2 won’t make much of a difference, so wtv. Obviously my main quarrel with this comparison is giving Artur a full support set in chapter 10. I’m sorry but there’s no way you’re going to have Lute and Artur adjacent to each other for 62 turns in 7 chapters and Joshua for 59 turns in 6 chapters. That’s roughly 75% of the time that both Lute AND Joshua are adjacent to Artur, and of course some joke chapters like 4 don’t take 10-12 turns to beat. Here’s the revised comparison giving Artur a C with both characters. Artur lv 14/0 (C Lute, C Joshua, thunder): 26 hp, 17 Mt, 13 spd, 5 def, 14 res, 5 lck, 36 avo Gerik lv 10/0 (steel sword): 32 hp, 22 Mt, 13 spd, 10 def, 4 res, 8 lck, 34 avo So now Gerik has a 5 atk lead, which is a whopping 10 damage in most enemy encounters, and that’s not even factoring in the additional advantages that his superior con gives, such as being able to use a steel blade (+3 Mt) with only 1 AS loss while Artur already loses 2AS just to upgrade to shine (+2 Mt). As for that def-res gap, checked it again for chapter 10 just to see if it ever changes. Aside from a couple mercenaries with 5-6 def and 1 res, the gap is always 3 or less. So even putting that into consideration, Gerik is still winning raw damage output. Then for durability, 6 hp and 5 def > 10 res and 2 avo, though there is the fact that Artur can avoid player phase counters with his 1-2 range tomes, so we’ll call that a tie. Actually, they don’t pass it at all. Most of the enemies have a lolable 4-5 skill, while the mercenaries and myrmidons have 11-12. Plus, when you factor in that Gerik’s durability isn’t crap and that slim lance criticals are pretty harmless, not to mention the second he has a C this problem is entirely gone, then this is largely a non-issue. Really, this is nothing compared to Artur’s problem of having 2 CEV at base level since his hp, def and avo were low enough at that point to have any significant risk of dying. Too bad magic enemies are outnumbered by physical enemies at least 5 to 1, which means Gerik’s hp and def lead matters a lot more than Artur getting tinked by mages. As for countering ranged enemies, the enemy is always going to favor a target who cannot counter, and Artur isn’t exactly going to solo a part of the map, so I don’t see where this advantage would ever receive any meaningful application. And of course, this advantage is merely temporary since once Gerik promotes, he can then go on to use hand axes. Problem is, promotion items are competed for, so Artur has to rob other mage-type characters of a promo item to get his early promo, which I think is questionable. Look at Moulder for instance. Moulder lv 15/0 (C Vanessa, C Gilliam): 28 hp, 10 mgc, 14 spd, 7 def, 10 res, 3 lck, 41 avo Artur lv 14/0 (C Lute, C Joshua): 26 hp, 13 mgc, 13 spd, 5 def, 14 res, 5 lck, 36 avo Moulder beats Artur in everything except mag and res. However, assuming both units promoted, Moulder would win offence anyway because his 11 con would allow him to use divine while 7 con Artur is likely still stuck using lightning/shine to avoid AS loss. Finally, a staff user gaining magic > a magic user gaining staves in terms of the team’s overall utility, so Moulder has Artur completely beat when it comes to promo item viability. Then you have Lute. Lute lv 12/0 (C Artur, C Vanessa, thunder): 22 hp, 22 Mt, 12 spd, 7 def, 11 res, 13 lck, 47 avo Artur lv 14/0 (C Lute, C Joshua, lightning): 26 hp, 17 Mt, 13 spd, 5 def, 14 res, 5 lck, 36 avo Again, Artur is getting crushed. 11 avo and 2 def >>> 4 hp and 3 res and Lute wins damage by a huge margin. Even Natasha provides decent competition for a guiding ring, so I don’t see how Artur is realistically going to promote before more rings start to show up. This comparison assumes Artur gets promoted while Gerik doesn’t and the only reasoning against doing that you gave was as follows: He’s not raping his exp gain, it’ll be the exact same as Artur. The only difference is that Artur can use staves, but staff exp usually gives less than CEXP even at high levels, so I can only see him using it in situations where there’s few enemies in the immediate radius, and that’s rare enough that Artur will only get maybe 3-4 levels on Gerik from here on to the end of the game. Moreover, Gerik wants to promote earlier so he can get axes for 1-2 range and higher attack power, in addition to the immediate stat gains from a promo which are likely more helpful than what Gerik will get from additional levelling in first tier. Then when we consider that Artur might not actually promote in chapter 11, then that whole advantage disappears and both units will likely promote at lv 20/0, meaning Artur won’t have a period where he’s promoted and Gerik is not, which is the only way he can ever amass anything resembling a lead on him. Yeah, funny how Artur with a full support set AND an early promotion is still losing Atk and spd, arguably the 2 most important stats in the game. Monsters that almost anyone can ORKO with iron weapons, mind you. The only real advantage brought forth is maybe against monster bosses, which are basically regular monsters with lots more hp and are easily 2RKOed anyway. I guess later in the game slayer is more helpful vs those Cyclops monsters, but by then you’re literally getting legendary weapons tossed at you like dodgeballs. Fair enough. I’ve never heard of this before. Xplain? Well he doesn’t need to catch up if he’s already ahead, though since you’re too lazy to compare their lategame, I might as well. Artur lv 20/12 (A Lute, B Joshua, Ivaldi): 38 hp, 41 Mt, 33 crit, 17 spd, 18 def, 28 res, 9 lck, 63 avo Gerik lv 20/8 (A Tethys, B Joshua, Garm): 51 hp, 45 Mt, 41 crit, 25 spd, 20 def, 12 res, 13 lck, 83 avo Pretty large win for Gerik. 13 hp, 2 def and 20 avo >>>>>16 res, so Gerik is undeniably winning durability. Offence is also a dominant win for the G-man, since even if you call raw att tied, he still wins spd by a whopping 8 as well as crit. Ok, I’ll admit it was a bit unfair to give Artur a heavy weapon like Ivaldi when he already has slayer. Though, if he downgrades to something lighter, the avo gap closes but Gerik then wins att by a larger margin. Also, Gerik has the option of using a killing edge/axe for a whopping 71 crit (91.59% in 2 hits), as well as brave weapons, whereas Artur doesn’t have such options. Last of all, Gerik can opt to get an S in either swords or axes, which means he’s ultimately facing less competition for a legendary weapon than Artur is. Considering Gerik could compare to supported+promoted Artur, I’m sure giving Artur a 3 chapter lead instead would more or less result in the same thing. If you gave both to Artur, he might actually start winning, but Gerik nonetheless wins most of the possible scenarios.

Edit: Ignore this post.