Sias

Before I weigh in further on the discussion, I'd like to talk some more about what actually makes a skill good in your opinion, because I really don't get how you can call Sol bad while listing PavGis as good stuff at the same time? I dunno, but I actually think that those three are pretty similar: They're all defensive skills that lower your need to heal (either due to damage reduction or direct recovery), completely chance-based and neither should be taken into consideration for an unlucky worst case scenario. I'd still give Sol the edge over the other ones however due to earlier availability and the fact that it's easier to get good healing from it than it is to achieve high damage reduction from PavGis. Most of your tanks should be able to do at least decent damage to enemies with Sol, but the decrease from PavGis only gets really good when your unit takes high damage - in which case it probably shouldn't have been sent into the battle to begin with. Mind you, I don't call Sol amazing or anything, but I just believe it isn't as bad as your're making it out to be, especially compared to what seems to be some of your favourites. Because finally, there's Miracle. It's probably the first thing I would throw out of someone's skill list as soon as I'm able to, so I really don't get its appeal? From your posts so far I thought you'd be a person that values secure and safe solutions without the need to rely on pure luck for your strategy, but doesn't Miracle do exactly that? It has no effect at all unless you screw up and commit a serious mistake (someone taking lethal damage), and even then, there's like a chance of only about a third (with capped luck in an optimized scenario) for it to do something. Honestly, that's... really not what I'd like to put my money on.

Imo Chapter 9 actually belongs to Revelation's hardest ones due to your lack of characters with good bases. It should get better from now on. Chapter 10 is quite easy anyways, throws a ton of stat boosters at you and is generally pretty good for training weaker units. The next few ones get harder again, but you should still be fine if you just keep an eye out for the promoted enemies that start to pop up rather frequently. Use the prepromotes that you're going to get on your own if necessary. Gold management is kind of weird in Revelations though: You get a lot of it early in the game, then there's a whole lot of nothing in the following time until chapter 19 starts drowning you in money again. Personally I wouldn't spend all my gold now but keep a little to buy master seals in the midgame.

The sum of most characters' natural stat growths is somewhere in between 250 and 300 points. Odin however gets a nice little bonus and totals at 330, I believe. It's not quite as much as Mozu with Aptitude (370), but definitely still at the top of the spectrum.

Nah. You can complete Apo with pretty much any variant of a child, it's just that the better ones are more efficient at their jobs. Anyways, Virion!Gerome is by far not the worst Gerome around, so you should be fine. Sure, you didn't get Berserker for him, but you have LB + Aggressor + Bowfaire as skill base and are then able to add some fillers (AS+2, Hit +20, DSup+, ...) on top of that to get a complete set. And if you should still dislike his performance, remember that you are not necessarily going to deploy all of the children regardless because you also want to have staff/rally-support and need a slot for Chrom (possibly with wife) and maybe Olivia as well.

I'm afraid there is no go-to best support for Lucina, it's reliant on multiple factors really, and mostly on what you want to get out of the pairing. First of all, it depends on how you paired up the parents, as the performance of your possible partners can change heavily from father to father. Secondly, you need to decide on how you'd like to use Lucina. You obviously have both magical and physical attacks with Dark Knights, but all in all you'll probably focus on one of these sides. Magic generally has better offense and saftey due to range, but swords offer you Falchion and go along with Lucy's naturally higher strength. For physical attackers, Berserkers are the standard partners due to high Str/Spd-boni, though Paladins and Assassins do work as well. Yarne, most Geromes and some variations of Inigo and Laurent are common as berserkers. For magical supports, you should use Sages instead (Brady, Owain, Laurent, some Inigos again). There's also the option to choose a Hero, Bow Knight or Dread Fighter, which works well with both swords and magic. Possible partners are Inigo, Gerome and some Yarnes for the first two, while pretty much everyone of the boys can perform kind of okay as a Dread Fighter. You also should consider if you want Lucy to just kill two of your enemies, or if you'd prefer to pair her up with one of the Galeboys (Owain, Brady, Inigo) for one additional action per player phase for the two of them. Considering Morgan, Limit Breaker would be the best option for your last skill slot. Vengeance needs Vantage to work well, Renewal is pretty meh anyways and Lethality is somewhat unreliable to begin with. It can kind of work in combination with Rightful King, but like Czar already said, this one isn't all that good either. I recommend Aggressor if you have it available, or alternatively you could procstack with Luna or slap a support skill onto him. Also, is there a special reason why he isn't using Galeforce?

Generally speaking, I think there isn't really any class that makes exceptional use of your Def-asset lategame. While I admit that +Def is very useful in the earlier chapters, it's pretty irrelevant for postgame class selection. You normally try to hit certain speed benchmarks with your characters and then focus on high attack power through Str/Mag and nice Skl for your procs. As you're playing on Normal (correct me if I'm mistaken) you should be able to reliably dodge a lot of the opponent's attacks anyways, and the ones that do hit you shouldn't hurt all that much. There's also the option of killing your enemy on player phase before they can retaliate or positioning your vulnerable units so that they can't get hit at all (Galeforce is helpful here). Anyways, regarding your skill setups: Keep in mind that the generic Lucina build is LB/Galeforce/Luna/Aether/DS+. You're able to improve this by replacing Luna with Ignus, but otherwise you can't change too much about it without actually making it less "optimal". You asked for a "more unique" build however, so feel free to modify this setup according to your preferences - your Lucy won't really suffer from some small changes here and there. I'll just drop some comments about your concrete skill combos though. Dark Flier Lucy: Your normally want Limit Breaker at any rate, so I'll definitely put this in. Galeforce is good, Aether as well. Tomefaire works as possible replacement for Luna/DS+ from the standard setup, should you not like the latter. Renewal is not that useful however, as you're probably avoiding a lot of damage by dodging anyways, and then there's still the possibilty of using an actual healer instead of spending a skillslot for this. If you're dead set on a recovery move though, you could try out Lifetaker, which is superior if you can reliably score some kills here and there. Finally, bowbreaker certainly has its niche, but when you just keep an eye on bow users before enemy phase (mark them), they shouldn't be much of a threat. If you still fear them however, you could use Iote's Shield as an alternative that doesn't give you Hit/Avoid, but instead negates the bonus damage entirely and also works against wind magic. Sorc Lucy: Sorceror isn't that good as a finishing class sadly. While dark magic can certainly break the maingame in half by Nosferatanking, this doesn't necessarily work well for postgame anymore - and the other dark magic spells besides Nosferatu aren't that great anyways. If you'd like another magic option, Sage has simply superior Mag/Skl/Spd all around - and then there also are Dark Flier and Valkyrie, both offering a nice movement boost. Regarding the skill setup, Hit+20 could be skipped entirely when you use a more accurate class instead. Alternatively you could aim for a similar effect by putting Anathema on Lucina's pair-up partner. Vengeance certainly is an option, but keep in mind that it requires you to run around with lifepoints as low as possible for maximum efficiency, which doesn't really seem to be your playstyle. You'd normally also want to combine Vengeance with Vantage and some good support to reach enough offensive firepower to kill your enemy before they get the potentially deadly counterattack in. Grandmaster: You presumably want to use Galeforce and LB here as well? I've talked about Renewal before, but Rightful King really isn't all that good either. You get better offense by simply adding another proc instead of it (Aether). Also, regarding the combination of Swordfaire and Tomefaire: Feel free to run both of them if you want, but usually people tend to focus on just on of their weapons even in hybrid classes. F!Robin: Again, you lack LB here. And combining Sol, Luna and Ignus isn't really all that beneficial either because their priority rating is kind of sucky (Sol>Luna>Ignus). This means that the most useful of those (Ignus for the best damage output) will activate the least, while the worst of them (Sol, which only adds a little survivability, but no offensive power) will appear the most. Anyways, I hope you don't mind the wall of text as I kind of noticed just now how much this has become.

Depends, honestly. Postgame!Brady obviously is always great, but if he's worth for you ingame is a different matter. Are his bases (kind of) good? Do you need another healer or would you rather get someone tanky to strengthen your frontline? Or, if you want to replace one of your current staffers with him, how urgently do you need their current advantage in form of better weapon ranks/stats/supports instead of his superior growth potential? Anyways, if you decide to use him, one of his main starting problems is that hes has only D rank in staffs and nothing else really. Some people therefore reclass him into Cavalier for Discipline, but you can also just train him up in the back and then work on some offensive ranks when he promotes, which is probably the safer option.

That's why I like high deployment- you have enough offensive potential to have some map control, and once you have that you can protect anyone, no matter how squishy they are. Keep in mind, though, you only need to be able to take a single hit to help out in combat or as a diversion. And while Maribelle's Def won't do her any favors there, it's not too hard to get her HP up to a point where she isn't OHKOed. The exp isn't a waste if it allows you to get Brady's Paralogue- even if neither Brady nor Maribelle ever contribute, there's plenty of combat exp there for your other units to train on. There's also the fact that on Lunatic(+) being 2HKOed by enemies isn't exactly an uncommon occurence. Like, most of yor mages and healers, the slow units and the myrmidon-like types with low defense constanly have to struggle because they get killed really quickly all game - and for Maribelle this isn't even that hard to avoid as you're not really hanging around in the frontline or doing melee combat anyways. You can actually stay pretty safe while healing and doing some ranged (chip) damage, there are certainly units that are more difficult to protect. Another thing in her favor is that even though she's physically vulnerable, magic (without Luna+) doesn't even really scratch her, so at least she's none of those units that have to fear getting demolished by long-range death all the time. Actually, this can get pretty absurd when you consider that the Maribelle on my recent Lunatic playthrough could have solo'd Gangrel because he simply wasn't able to do any damage to her. Oh well.

Vaike!Nah is pretty solid as she gets some strength, skill, speed and Luna with hero as possible ending class. I would change Libra!Brady to Virion!Brady however, because he generally only needs stat mods anyways and appreciates Virion's +1Skl/+2Spd more than the alternative +1Mag. Libra could then go to Laurent who's probably better off with him than with Frederick (terrible magic) or Kellam (is he even good for anyone really?). In order to pair up you children, your general marriage setup would be nice to know, as you only mentioned Chrom/Olivia, Ricken/Lissa and MU/Owain. Morgan/Lucina is an easy and convenient way to reach 100% dual strike rate for you strongest unit, but not necessarily the only option you have available, so there certainly are alternatives - and maxing dual strike rate isn't even essential in the first place. In general, matching your children so that they benefit from each other's pair-up-mods and possibly extended movement is beneficial. The classic pairing we have is Sage/Dark flier, but Sniper/Sage, Sniper/Berserker and Hero/Berserker are good as well (along with some others) - again, it kind of depends on what children you have available.

I dunno if you want some further advice, but I'll just write down some possibly helpful stuff that comes to my mind: Always activate the big pink enemy range marker in order to immediately see safe spots for your healers/squishies. If you notice other especially dangerous enemies around (moving bosses, bow users or wind mages near your fliers...), add an extra personal range marker for them (the red one). It's also generally useful if you look at some of the enemy stats before you actually start the battle. Comparing speed values can be pretty nice for planning your approach of the map, and you can always do a quick estimation of a character's defensive power (enemy attack - your Def/Res) before plopping him/her into the range of multiple enemies. These two stategies are probably the most important ones around, cause if you always check how many enemies can do how much damage to one of your units before you place them, your troups should be pretty much safe from landing in a deadly situation. Additionally, utilize the time that you get when the opponents don't rush you to heal your team before continuing to fight. Abuse the weapon triangle/surrounding terrain (if possible), and also remember that you can clog up the area around a vulnerable unit with other characters to protect it or hide the person behind someone else through pair up. Pair up in general is pretty strong as a mechanic as well. The best way to get better is practice though, so just continue to play a bit more and you'll notice yourself improving with time anyways.

Yep, that's pretty much what I suggested across my numerous posts here. :) The children being (distant) relatives is a nice idea as well, haven't thought about that so far. It could certainly be a fitting explanation for Kanna's existence. And because Eponine's parents have met with a terrible fate when she was still a baby, uncle Zero happily took care of her... It does sound a bit out of character for him, but whatever. He has a magical time chamber in the garden to throw her into if she gets too annoying. Explaining the whole child business with magic is indeed the easy way out, so I think that the options not involving random creation of life through mysterious powers are the generally preferred ones. But considering the possibility of creating humans through magic: As far as I know, this hasn't really worked anywhere in the series, but we already got close to artificial life in the form of

Growths in case of Kamui/Zero: (Father#1’s growth rates + Father#2’s growth rates + Child’s absolute growth rates) / 3 + class growth rates Skillset would be similar with: Classes passed on by Father#1 + Classes passed on by Father#2 + Possible bonus classes the child might have Yeah, we have plenty of options that could be used even if we avoid adoption: Using Nyx' forbidden black magic, putting magical powders in your Zero's drink, having Camilla happily volunteer as surrogate mother for Kamui's child...

But they don't need to be exactly the same person. It's what I said before: Sumia!Lucy isn't Maribelle!Lucy isn't Olivia!Lucy and so on. But even though they have their differences, they still all are Lucina, and they still have tons of similarities in about everything what defines them. If you think about it like that, there never is a real "Lucina". And there is never going to be one in any game being exactly the same person that she is. We only have different variations of this one archetype of character, and while they all have different circumstances, they are Lucinas nevertheless. Basically, you could say that all of them are only lookalikes of that one role model, but nobody does, so why do you want to apply that argumentation to adopted children here? Noone would want an adopted Eponine to be a biological child (you still could use surrogate mothers instead, of course), and noone wants her to be completely the same person that such a child would be, but people want a kid for Zero who is still an "Eponine" regardless of that. If you argue like you currently do, you could say that every possible child of his is just a lookalike of the one and true Eponine, simply because she is never going to exist at any point. With every different mother, we get a different Eponine, and even for heterosexual pairings they wouldn't all be the exact same. So if that is perfectly acceptable for those pairings, why shouldn't it be for an adopted child as well? We would just get another variation of Eponine on top of the ones that are already existing. When we can have similar versions of that one model character for every single of Zero's heterosexual relationships, why can't we have this for his homosexual pairing as well?

And this is what I was saying before, pretty much. The whole freaking child system is not logical, so why should it need to be for homosexuals?

As I said, it's more unlikely for the shapeshifting children to be adopted, but honestly... What are the odds of suddenly finding a small dragon girl (Nowi) while running through an enemy country's desert and fending off some weird religious fanatics in the first place? And even then, there'd still be surrogate mothers if you wanted blood-relation. I... don't really agree with you that time/dimension-jumping is more realistic than getting your biological child in a gay relationship. As capmalachi pointed out, the kids stay the same in every other relationship, so why not here as well? Just because they aren't blood-related? But if you're going to have two children that are super similar anyways (besides minor differences), why don't you just take one of them and use it for both cases? Um, but if you look at how the whole child business has worked so far, you'll notice one thing: Chrom/Sumia gives you Lucina. So does Chrom/MU. And Chrom/Maribelle. And every other pairing with Chrom that there is. While of course you can argue now that Sumia!Lucy isn't 100% identical with Maribelle!Lucy, and therefore Sumia!Lucy isn't exactly the same child as Maribelle!Lucy (I totally agree with you here), this isn't the point. Yes, both are different - they have other classes, caps, growths, another family constellation, ... - but in fact everything besides this, their character, personality and even the support with the respective mother stay identical. So yeah, while in theory both Lucinas should be significantly different and not be the same child character, they simply are. And it's an entirely similar business with every other offspring in the game. The children in the different pairings are never exactly equal, but still are like 95% identical. And sorry, but there you have your violation of logic in Fire Emblem, because never ever would someone have pretty much the same child with 20 different partners. So it could be perfectly possible for a gay pairing to just adopt their respective biological kids, because if you throw around children illogically all the time, why not here as well? Or, if you want to avoid this option: Add surrogate mothers, making things even more simple. If someone can have the same child with a dozen of mothers in the game, why not with a surrogate one to bring it into the relationship afterwards?

I don't necessarily think that bullied/depressed LGBT people who overemphasize their sexual identity are the ones complaining here. There surely are some of those, but I heavily doubt it's anywhere close to the majority. As I described more detailed in my post above, I perfectly understand someone when he/she dislikes the lack of options and children for homosexual pairings.

Yeah. The writing of this support is pretty terrible all in all, and addition to the bad fanfic stuff like maaagic powder we have parts that seem somewhat inconsistent to what we've seen from Soleil's personality so far. I mean, after noticing her inherent skill and the supports with her dad/F!Kamui/Ophelia/partially Foleo, you do get an idea about how you expect her to behave in similar situations. And then there's this support. Why is she suddenly fainting around cute girls, when on other occasions she was happily flirting with them ? And why can't she have lesbian S-supports as a bisexual who stated (Foleo/Soleil, I think?) that she likes women more than men? Especially after some of the supports she has with females? And by the way, one of those articles said that: "she pretended this way to get revenge on her father but ended up regretting it when it became a habit". I've never read this before, so I'm interested: In what conversation does she actually talk about it? Her recruitment? A specific support? It would certainly explain things, although it's still somewhat weird. Regarding this, I disagree. I think the general consensus is that gay marriage is a good addition, but there are two things about it which some people think are badly handled: First of all, homosexual pairings get no children. And secondly, you have only one option per path (if at all). Characters that very well could've been bisexual considering their personality (Cyrus, Soleil, maybe Camilla and Aqua from what people mentioned so far) simply aren't. Personally this doesn't really bother me all that much, but I believe as well that IS easily could've done better and I understand the people that complain.

I'm... not really getting behind all of your argumentation here. If the biological and the adopted children would be the same, that would be just as true for their determining parent, as long as you don't change the mechanic at some point. Same parent, same corresponding child, regardless of hetero or homo. What does change here so that "neither of them" has a canonical parent anyomore, when the one child that you get as soon as the father/mother marries is still completely the same? And why exactly would you "lose a lot"? And no, the problems of missing Cynthia and Maiden!Lucy are something entirely different. In case of Maiden!Lucy you still get the child, you just lose a potential S-sup-bonus for Chrom and some classes/caps for Lucina. For Cynthia, while admittedly you can miss out on an entire character, that's just because you didn't marry her mother to someone (because she has a very limited partner selection and you apparently didn't bother to check out her options before/liked other pairings more). If Cynthia would have only been existing in a relationship of Sumia with MU/Chrom/Gaius, but not for Henry/Frederick because of whatever reason, then we would have the same scenario. But the biological children wouldn't become the adoptive ones, the kids would always be exactly the same persons regardless of case. They'd just have a slightly different relationship towards their parents - and I don't see any problem with that. Along with this, their behaviour/abilities/personality/whatever could also be pretty much entirely alike, because the people raising them don't change (well, at least the corresponding parent doesn#t, and the other one is irrelevant anyways besides passing down caps/classes/hair colour). If you think about it, almost all of the second gen characters we had so far in Awakening/Fates could've just been adopted as well. There are exceptions of course, like Lucina and Owain because of bloodline, and things would also be harder to explain for the shapeshifters, but in general... It would've been perfectly possible. Especially so when we can throw small kiddos into parallel dimensions where time passes by at a faster rate anyways. Regarding the possible completely new replacement children, I explained in my last post already why I think that they'd be more trouble than worth.

Well, as far as I know part of this misunderstanding stems from the fact that the Kamui/Zero epilogue mentions them pretty much adopting those children. I've never read it personally, but I have heard multiple people before say that the description could be fitting, so I don't know? However, I think if they're going to do gay marriage again, they should actually add the characters' normal children through adoption. Because honestly, if you leave them completely out (like in Fates), you have the problem that someone doing these specific pairings can never recruit certain characters, which is dumb. And if you just gave the pairing some additional new replacement characters that only appear as adopted kids, I guarantee you that there would be heavy problems as well. On the one side, you'd have the people who really really like X and want to use him/her, but he/she is only obtainable by doing a gay pairing, ewww... And on the other side, there are those ones who want to waifu/husbando Y and can't, because he/she is just in the game when you start a relationship with the MU as his/her father/mother. So yeah, if they're going to do homosexual pairings again, please just slap the respective children on top of that.

I largely agree with you, judging from what I know about the plot so far. Honestly, after all the promotion of Nohr's story being so very exceptional in contrast to Hoshido's standard we-get-invaded-and-fight-back-stuff, I'm kind of disappointed with what we got: Mindlessly following evil slime dad's order's even though it's totally obvious that he's a bad guy. Yay. Considering the whole "light in the darkness"-business, Kamui doesn't do enough to stand up to this reputation. Because well, he mainly seems to just roll along with what's going on. And if the part about Aqua's crystal ball first showing the truth about Garon and then exploding is true, so that Kamui actually decides that he can't talk with his siblings to convince them, but needs to push the invasion even further in order to reach the Hoshiadan throne faster... I hope this is explained in some good way that I don't know about yet, or it is one of the dumbest plot devices I ever heard of. I can definitely see both. :) But yeah, Kamui is terribly naive in the Nohr route. And this makes quite a bit of the problems/drama seem to be avoidable. All in all, I dunno. I guess I'll just have to wait for the translation. Or maybe I'll do another post about what I was hoping for the story to be later on.

I agree with this. Putting in the children really wouldn't be much work at all, and I'm kinda sad they aren't there. They already had all the options for hair colour/inheritance anyways through Femui/Zero and Mamui/Shara, so the only really "new" thing they'd need to add are the generic parent/child-supports. And it's even weirder when you consider that adoption actually takes place in the epilogue - so why not in the actual game? I'm still hoping for this, as unlikely as it might be. And maybe with a second homo option for each version of Kamui as well? One can always dream, I guess. Mamui/Cyrus as additional gay option pls, I'm totally shipping this pairing.

Yeah, it seems that Kamui was busy with reading most of the time while he was put away by Garon. I'm not really sure which support it was anymore, but one of them described the vast library of the castle he was in, containg a seemingly endless number of books. He apparently also had some kind of reading contests (?) with Joker and Felicia, and at the end of the day they all talked about what they had learned from their respective books.

You're sure that it doesn't work like in Awakening again where you had fixed RNs that lead to fixed stat boni, but abusing battle saves you could change those RNs and gain different level ups?

Maybe Nintendo does some minor growth adjustments during localisation? I dunno, but this has happened in the past already, and if they realize that some characters might not exactly work out the way they were intended to be...

Yep, but it's third route only.