Czar_Yoshi

Owain already has staff access without Ricken. For other units you might want to look into Lissa, Maribelle, Miriel, Sumia, Cordelia, Lucina, Cynthia, Severa, and either Avatar or Morgan. Bolded: ? If Gregor's still floating around, you could give him to Gerome to free up Henry for Nah. Keep in mind when making your skillsets that your units will pretty much always be paired and certain skills do nothing in the back. For instance, four out of five of that Yarne's skills will have no effect when he's in the back (which he'll always want to be, being a hard support and all...), assuming you meant DG+ and not DSp+. I'm gonna go with ingame as that team fits it much better.

In that case, you'll want to look into more Counter protection- anyone without a Bow will have a hard time reliably taking enemy phases, and anyone without Galeforce will need to be rescued by a Staffbot or face an EP. I'd advise using classes with staves on as many of your combat units as you can get away with, so they can multitask as staffbots. Falcos are probably the best at this.

I feel like I've seen this topic before, but this is roughly what I put in the last one... Male ingame: Tact/Merc/Cav Female ingame: Tact/Merc/Peg Male non-Apo postgame: Merc/Wyvern/Cav Female non-Apo postgame: Peg/Merc/DM (Cordelia's class set, incidentally) Male Apo: Barb/Archer/Wyvern Female Apo: Peg/DM/Wyvern Explanations: Ingame, starting as a Tactician is my primary concern for either gender because of Veteran. It's a shame I only get one promoted class from it, but Ignis is still useful. Merc is an all-round amazing class that offers AT for conserving forges, Sol for self-healing, and Bow access for Counter, as well as two Breakers. For male, I chose Cav as the final class because Paladin makes a good ending class as a lead, and GK offers DG+ should I marry and go hard support as a Hero. For female, Peg is pretty obvious thanks to Galeforce and both Falco and DF being excellent ending classes. Male non-Apo postgame, I'm going for an ending setup of Wyvern Lord with Sol/Aegis/AT/Deliverer/situational Breaker, which is a pretty solid set for hit-and-run solos and takes me through a lot of good classes getting my skills. Female non-Apo postgame, I'm using Cordelia's set, which has tons of options. Likely I'd end as either a DF or DK using GF/Lifetaker/AT/Relief/Tomebreaker, but I've also got Patience, Sol and Vengeance in my skill pool that could go over something else if needed. Male Apo, I'm running a standard Hit+20 Berserker (+Str/-Def) with the intention of passing Wyvern to Sumia!Lucina!Morgan to use as her final class. Ideally Barb would become DM for her so she could get Vengeance, and she could inherit Axefaire for a better Apo weapon type. Female Apo, I'll be running a Vengeance Wyvern set myself using +Spd/-Def and an Assassin Virion/Stahl!Yarne to hit 75. I'd want my Peg to become Barb for Morgan, he'd have Hit+20 from Yarne and Vengeance from Avatar to put together a good GF Berserker set.

Where's Henry? Can he go on Cynthia? If he can, Noire wants Gaius. If he can't, Fred!Cynthia may be worth it to get Noire Gaius. If Gaius!Cynthia is a matter of aesthetics, Gregor is probably your best bet for Noire. Inigo will be happy with Libra, and Nah can do very well with Vaike, and has a good (if very limited) build with Virion. Nah also loves Henry, but he's a higher priority for Cynthia if he's free. Virion gives Yarne an excellent Skl mod and Skl+2, allowing him to be the best non-Morgan DS boosting support in the game as a Sniper, and gives him Hit+20 and Prescience to completely fix Berserker's hitrate issues. Stahl!Yarne is the same except he trades 1 Skl for 2 Str. Streetpass teams always fail and should never be used to judge a pairing's worth. Sage Yarne? Yarne is Awakening's premier physical hard support, and one of the only two 2nd gen males who have a predisposition to physical! VV is nice ingame, but in Apo it's useless without 100% DS with a magical lead and careful planning. Grinding or no? Because on nogrind you're never getting all those skills during maingame. Especially Pavise and DG+, General and GK are a huge pain to level through.

Three, but Cht.25 is a joke (it's the easiest map in the game to 1-turn- as long as you use fliers, you can just take a straight line to the boss and ORKO through Aegis+ with a Brave Bow).

One option would be to switch to Chrom x Maribelle. You'd get Brady for a Sage support and there would be room for Severa again. If Chrom x Sumia is already locked in, you could go with Morgan running Vengeance/Deliverer instead if you like. Are you on Lunatic? RaR3's stats change depending on your difficulty. But several tanky units with Sol and DG+ should be able to handle it, as long as you watch out for Jaffar and Linus. Fortunately postgame doesn't require all that much thinking on the fly if you do your planning well. You never need to stop and check whether something will kill you ahead of time if you've already ran your calcs, you know who to send where ahead of time, and hopefully there are no nasty surprises you forgot about. You're late to the party, bro. He doesn't give Yarne anything bad and has nice mods, but also doesn't have any extra skills Yarne wants (except a Faire for Assassin). Overall it's a solid pairing, but just not exceptional like Stahl!Yarne and Virion!Yarne.

I'm sure it's been done, bu it's not very entertaining- all you'll get is a difficulty spike at the start while Avatar gets rolling, and then it'll be roughly the same once he/she gets warmed up until lategame and especially Grima. Basically it would make the hard parts of Lunatic harder without having much of an impact on the easy parts.

On the one hand, Mov hardly matters since you've got so many units. On the other hand, two Boots go a lot further the fewer pairs you have, so it might be a good idea to shoot for high Mov anyway. If one of your Snipers is Virion!Severa, she could run Deliverer over a second proc and the other two could use Aether/Luna with Boots (assuming you're doing Avatar x Lucina, which works nicely if you want Avatar as a Berserker).

Attacks Per Turn. Basically you need to be able to kill at least five mooks per turn in order to stay safe. Any less than that, and mobility will be a huge hassle and you could run up against difficulties with the timed bits. You also want a little bit of insurance against one of your attacks failing to KO, so Olivia is important. Nine Staffbots is pretty good. Once you have more Staffbots than you have attacking pairs, a huge amount of possibilities with them open up. Of course, finding that many Valflames/Shocksticks can be a pain, so you might have to settle with less Mag than usual on some of them.

Rhetorical question backfire- you are in fact talking to the one person on SF who is notorious for having no experience with all but the easiest things Awakening has to offer. No offense, Ana. If Awakening was a multiplayer game, this would be a big problem. It's not. But you seem to think it's a problem anyway, so let's look at what would happen if this stuff was actually regulated. Let's make a rule that DLC and Spotpass are banned 'til you've unlocked Grima in Lunatic(+). That sounds fair, no more abusing DLC and stuff, right?, Well, actually you could still use it for the Paralogues- better ban it until you've completed those, too. Of course, that involves getting all the children, which involves lots of building supports. Maybe you're a boss and can get all the children in nogrind, but you likely aren't and have to use the Risen. Oh yeah, Risen- a free source of exp, weapons, support points and Gold. Let's ban those too. And the Barracks, too random. Better take out event tiles too. Congratulations, you've just made it possible to make it impossible to unlock postgame. However, it was a necessary casualty to help balance the game. See where I'm going with this? Next I'll wind up banning pairup, and then I'll ban certain skills because they're OP, and then I'll ban more skills because they were the next best thing and are now the new OP, and eventually I'll ban skills alltogether because it creates imbalance when some units get lots of skills normally and others have all theirs banned. OK, units are fairly balanced now, right? No, Sorc is still OP thanks to Nos. Gotta ban Nos. Those Regalia are also pretty spiffy, as are forged weapons, and effective weapons, and Falchion's infinite uses are getting on my nerves, and whoops, I've banned all the weapons in the game. Now it's completely unbeatable, but it's still not balanced yet because different units have different growth rates and some are better than others! Let's normalize all the growths. Set them all to 50. Seems fair. Let's also give all the units the same starting class, class set and mods, to further take away from unit discrepancy. Might as well have them all join in the Prologue too so none of them are favored by join times either. You know what this looks like right now? A pre-alpha version of the game. Too much heavy-handedness in "balancing" done by restriction only will only result in an unplayable mess. Maybe you think Awakening is a mess already, maybe it is, but it's a playable mess, and there's a big difference. I personally have no problems regarding self-restraint in terms of grinding and DLC, and even if I did it wouldn't even be a bad thing so long as I'm having fun. Is my sense of self-esteem going to be damaged by completing "challenge runs" in which I don't grind? Only if my skin is thinner than wet paper and I try to brag about doing it. On the contrary, I enjoy having the ability to limit myself in my gameplay options, forcing me to come up with new strategies, or to go all out and smash things for a bit. While challenge runs are fun and all, not using DLC isn't one of them. Everyone (well, most everyone) has some basic rules they play by in the game in order to have fun. I never use Sorcs because I find them offensive, and this holds true for normal gameplay and challenges. Do I feel the need to mention it every time I define a challenge I'm doing? No, because restrictions you take on aren't status symbols (if they were, I'd ask for a standing ovation right now for never using some obscure Spotpass character that nobody uses). So please think twice before complaining about powerful optional features. And then look a second time and see how much Lunatic(+) actually did restrict: enemies can't be milked for exp, Spotpass teams don't give exp or Wexp, and Risen are strong enough that fighting them not only makes the game harder, but is prohibitively difficult even to someone who's already very comfortable with the difficulty as-is. Spotpass/Renown items and units can't be unlocked until Cht.3 is completed, and no DLC 'til Cht.4. To many people, this completely shuts down attempts to stomp the game with grinding, and I think it's enough. Wuuut. Even with no DLC or even Spotpass, Awakening has the best postgame of the series so far. Other than that, only Sacred Stones has had anything remotely resembling a postgame. Awakening's postgame with all that stuff is one of the best I've ever played on a handheld system (only Pokemon immediately stands out as better).

Forged effective weapons can still do a number on the L+ enemies for a while- getting +5 mt on the Renown Beastkiller and having a spare Arms Scroll is crucial to having Olivia pass Lucina Galeforce in nogrind Lunatic+. It still takes plenty of luck to avoid Pavise+/Counter and Vantage+/Hawkeye combos, but does work with lots of luck.

True... But Cordelia has no support with Chrom (not even to A), and during the main story neither of them ever directly address the other (Barracks don't count). In fact, the only time they can ever talk is in Summer Scramble if Cordelia is unmarried. So it might be pushing it a little to say they're best friends, when in fact Chrom hardly knows who she is. Also keep in mind that as the future is a separate timeline, characters can develop in different ways. It's possible this is the case with Cordelia (she might be able to get over her Chrom infatuation in the timeline you play, but did she do it in the bad future?).

Laurent has both Counter and Vengeance naturally, so Henry won't help him there. If this is for ingame, I recommend Gregor. If it's for postgame, difficulty doesn't matter and you should just pick one of Laurent's normally good fathers (Lon'qu, Ricken, Gregor, etc). You need a minimum of 5 apt to reasonably beat S.Apo without any EP combat. Any less and you can't one-shot the packs of 5 that enemies usually come in. I recommend packing two double Galepairs and a Chrom x Olivia couple on the side (8 apt) for safety, along with plenty of Staffbots. You'll need to be careful around NS and his mooks because it's very hard to kill the mooks on PP without taking damage thanks to Vantage+ and Counter, and you have much less combined HP than normal to spread the damage out on. Otherwise, it's not that difficult and actually pretty fun (and takes way less prep time, too).

Raging into space will get you nowhere, you know.

The story is the worst out of all FEs, the heroes are buckets of tropes with no depth, plenty of disturbing traits and no self-awareness, the villains reek and have poor to no motives, the map design isn't very interesting, and there's a very large jump in difficulty between Hard and Lunatic that many people can't handle. Aside from that, what SoC said (I happen to like Awakening despite its flaws, but there are people who take it waaay too far).

Actually, it'll run out precisely when the enemies start promoting. True story: I've wasted more time resetting on Sacred Stones than on Lunatic+ (not counting "intentional" resets in which I was testing strats and ideas rather than trying to clear the chapter).

In SoC's defense, this thread does say "Cordelia" in the title, so it would technically still be a Cordelia thread even to one who always referred to her as Tiamo...

Because only Nintendo is allowed to put innuendo in their games! The players must be forbidden from this secret art of game design...

Yes, Levins give the highest single damage hits on Thronie, and it you're not using Braves they're wonderful tools for fighting him. I recommend Levin over Bolt personally, as Hit will almost never be an issue and they have better distribution. DFs, GMs and DKs are god Levin users, DFs and Monks are good for Bolts. The lowly Trickster also deserves some mention here as the fastest user of either Levin or Bolt who has good enough Mag to back it up. They're normally a silly class due to being swordlocked with 35 Str, but since Levin is a thing for you it might be worth looking into them (they do have very nice Skl and pairup bonuses).

It's rarely a problem, but if it is, just buy her a new one from Spotpass. She's best as a Manakete anyway, so there's really no reason to take her out of it. Do note that it's kind of expensive and by Cht.8 the flood of Bullion hasn't started yet, so if you buy one without thinking you could quickly find yourself having financial woes. It's a big ticket item if you're using Nowi, but getting it means one less Javelin forge for the Pegs, one less Seal from Anna, or no Rexcalibur for your Avatar, all of which are very important depending on how you're playing.

Thronie has tons of Def and Aegis+, so Bows are actually one of the least effective weapons on him, damage-wise (they're good if you're Longbowing, though- he's only got 2 range). Tomes can hit his weaker defensive stat, so I'd go with those instead.

Nothing happens to your file in the long run, but note that in Cht.6 enemy AI has the Thieves prioritize attacking Marth over unlocking the door. If Marth falls before the Thieves are dead, one of them could open the door and then you're screwed. So, after that silly Lunatic Tier Thread, I've been thinking about exactly how much I could milk a 6 Galeforce setup for, and am trying to see how big of an impact it has on the feasibility of a -Def Lunatic+ nogrind run. I'll probably have to run through it several times if it works to iron out a strategy, but earlygame was relatively painless this time around (seriously, Int's strats are -Def proof) so it shouldn't be too bad. Sumia is currently Lv.3 after Cht.3 (with the boss kill). I'll see how things go from here, though I probably won't get more time to work on it 'til Thursday evening at the earliest.

I also never mentioned Rallies, pairup or All+2, because AT is primarily for non-Apo postgame, where it's usually redundant and/or unnecessary to use all that stuff. 75 Spd is what you want to have at least one unit of, not what all your units need to hit. The real "minimum" acceptable Spd for S.Apo is 60 (threshold for not getting doubled by Thronie). There are only three enemies with 70 Spd spread out over two waves, all of which are fairly frail by Apo standards and easy to ORKO, so all having more than two 75 Spd pairs does is give you more options for how to deal with them. And options are nice, but your team needs to be designed to do more than fight two specific enemies to do well in Apo. The real beefgate is Thronie (64+3 Def, 55+3 Res, Aegis+, Counter, tons of Avo and enough Atk to OHKO anything that's taking damage from Counter) and his thronless wave 5 clones. They're the ones you want to watch out for. Axes are actually one of the best weapon types in Apo, given that enemy weapon composition is made up primarily of Axes and Lances and there are almost no Swords.

Having a unit who fails to get 100% AT even with LB is certainly interesting. Losing that Lck won't really hurt you, so it's not something to avoid, but you might have to worry about crits while training. Otherwise Gaius!Noire!Morgan is pretty good (seriously, look at Gaius's mods. Some of the best in the game, father-wise, right there).

I didn't read everything (I'll get around to it tomorrow, and give a full analysis), but I'm noticing that you forgot Rallies in your Hit calcs. +10 Skl and +14 Lck (don't forget that Rally Lck gives +8) make a pretty big difference. When doing Hitrate calculations I prefer to calculate Skl and Lck in separate steps from Hit itself. eg: Skl: base +mods +LB +Rally +pairup +tonic = Lck: base +mods +LB +Rally +pairup +tonic = Hit: base +weapon +pairup +skills = This is also nice because you now have your Skl calculated separately when you want to check your DS rate, instead of having to dig it out of a pile of numbers somewhere. Also, Defender has no effect when supporting.