Czar_Yoshi

?

*Pairs everyone up and then kills all the fathers off before the timeskip* Now Lucina's the youngest of the bunch. Except Gerome and her sibling. And for some reason all the mothers still haven't heard of their children.

Nobody needs them in the long run (except Chrom's mag) though. if you're not using them for thresholds, use them where they'd save the most effort getting someone started- which can very well be on one of the children. I use Nowi because when given an early Dragonstone+, some Seraph Robes and a merc Avatar support, she's better than half my team right off the bat and takes only a chapter or two to become a full-powered tank- but due to her growths her tankiness lasts far longer into lategame than Avatar's. Nah also gives early Second Seal access. Basically she does what Donnel wishes he could do, only with an overhead in planning instead of babying, and she's far and away one of the best units in Vanilla Lunatic for it. She's not nearly as good in Lunatic+ due to having a big weakness to Counter and Luna+ (her HP is by far her weak point for the first few levels, and that's what you need to take Counter/Luna+ abuse), and because it's harder to feed her all of Cht.8 thanks to Pass. She's still good after she gets going, she just takes a lot more to get there.

Vanilla Lunatic? Seraph Robes for Nowi, Energy Drop for Cordelia, Goddess Icons for Avatar, and sometimes Naga's Tear for Sumia. Others go anywhere they can break a threshold. Lunatic+ is usually the same except I don't use Nowi.

If the sole purpose of Lunatic+ were to be sadistic, you'd be seeing stuff like Miracle and Breakers, and procs would have buffed effects instead of activation rates- aka more turn-based randomness instead of pre-battle randomness. Fortunately, that's not the point. So stuff like Nihil (and most of the other "Lunatic+" skills being suggested) would fit much better in Apo (always occurring on major bosses would work too).

He's 16 at the proper start of SD (Cht.1). I'm having a hard time buying that Virion is 35...

They pretty much always have TF by the time they're fully capped.

Because pairing up can more than triple a unit's damage output from Dual Strikes alone. Males and females have flat-out different roles that deliberately compliment eachother. Neither one is "better" than the other, because neither can function properly alone. Do females generally function better as leads? Yes, they do. Males also function much better as supports. Since this just adds to overall unit diversity, I don't see it as a problem. However, a skill like this would be incredible as long as copied skills don't stack. It would open dozens of new possibilities for both ingame, grinding and postgame that just aren't there at the moment without doing anything blatantly overpowered (Agg on a female doesn't make as much difference as you'd think- try Chrom + Chrom!Inigo and see how a Dual Agg pair works. Fun, but nothing gamebreaking). Although it would probably have no effect on skills that can't be inherited anyway, so Agg doesn't even matter.

75 Spd is OK to forgo for all of general's other boosts- the Mov is actually the big barrier to using them- they need Boots or Deliverer. With a +5 Spd mod and a +2 Spd support, they hit 69 which is the next highest Spd benchmark, and both Sumia!Lucina and Gaius!Kjelle are excellent candidates for doing that. But anyway, let's see what happens if one of them does decide to take on Anna without 75 Spd. I'll go with Sumia!Lucina@General (LB/GF/DS+/Luna/Aether) x Stahl!Yarne@Berserker (LB/Agg/AF/Hit+20/Prescience). Yarne could probably manage All+2 over prescience, but I'm too lazy to do Hit calcs right now and don't remember what Stahl!Yarne needs for Anna off the top of my head so I'm playing it safe. Lucina gets the Gradivus and Yarne gets a 5/15 Brave. Lucina's Atk: 50(base) +10(LB) +10(Rally) +10(pairup) +2(tonic) +19(B.Axe) =101. Yarne's Atk: 50(base) +5(mods) +10(LB) +10(Rally) +10(Agg) +5(AF) +18(B.Axe) +2(tonic) =110. Lucina's Def should be 73. Anna has 75 Atk now. Assuming Anna does proc Aether and hits both times, Lucina takes 2+39 damage and has 44 HP left. Lucina counterattacks for 21+26+26+21+26 =120, assuming no procs. Anna dies on Yarne's 3rd swing, and Lucina takes 42 damage from Counter, so she lives with 2 HP left. If she gets a Luna on either hit, she'll do 35+26+26+21 or 21+26+26+35 =108 and KO Anna before taking Counter damage, surviving with either 9 or 23 HP left. If she gets an Aether on the first hit, she does 21+35=56 and recovers 10 HP, dying to Counter. She needs 3 more HP to survive, which can be achieved by lowering the forge on her Axe. Dropping it all the way does 19+33 =52 and heals 9 (53), causing her to survive with 1HP. Excellent. It shouldn't mess with either of the earlier KOs (116 and 104, with Anna dying at the same places each time). After taking 52 from Lucina's Aether, Yarne does 26+26 and finishes her off. If she procs Aether on her second proc, Anna will die to the Luna hit and Lucina won't take Counter damage from it. This is cool. I'll do hitrate checks just in case later. They don't show up that often, but when they do they're in packs. No Regalia on Risen.

As I said, it's preferable to the alternative.

Mostly fine to me. About Inigo's class though, consider that when your Def is very high and you're fighting a lot of foes, a little extra makes a big difference- if your foes are doing 10 damage to you, switching to a +2 Def support like Paladin reduces that to 5 damage, letting you survive 15 hits instead of 7. If they're doing 5 already, you go from taking 16 hits to KO to being invincible. The effect isn't as pronounced against stuff with Luna+ and Counter, true, but it's massive against normal mooks.

You know, all that would actually be fine (if more than a little creepy) if the game had any self-awareness about it whatsoever. But no, it takes itself just as seriously as Sonic '06, and we all know how that turned out.

2 less Spd, 7 more Skl. Actually, apart from Mov and Spd (and Swd access) GK has nothing over General- General even has more Mag and Res! The difference is so extreme that GK has the lowest total stat caps in the game out of any promoted class (even worse that Griffon and Bow Knight), while General has the best. In total, General has 2 more Str, 10 more Mag, 7 more Skl, 2 less Spd, 2 more Def, and 5 more Res. If you decide to make Kjelle a General, drop All+2 in exchange for either Astra or Deliverer, and switch her support to a Berserker- she'll lose 5 Spd from the deal, keeping her above the next threshold (69). She'll definitely need Boots if you don't give her Deliverer, but the raw power from a procstacking General with a Berserker support is very tempting... For reference, Atk: 50(base) +1(mods) +10(LB) +10(Rally) +10(Berserker) +5(LF) +17(B.Lance) +2(tonic) =105 before procs. Her support is likely to be packing 100+ Atk as well. If you like speedy Generals, Sumia!Lucina is roughly the same as this but with DS+ for guaranteed Berserker hits. Very powerful if she's married to Stahl!Yarne. You can also opt to pair either of them with a Paladin for more Def- they won't miss out on 69 Spd, but their Def becomes high enough to use as an asset. The Paladin can also make a nice ferry.

Lon'qu!Kjelle will be the highest (6/6) but she lacks GF. Other than that, Gaius!Kjelle will be what you want. Gaius!Kjelle@GK (LB/GF/LF/Luna/All+2) x An Assassin Spd: 37 (base) +5(mods) +10(LB) +10(Rally) +9(pairup) +2(All+2) +2(tonic) =75 No procstack for you, which hurts because GK's Skl smells and no Vengeance, but oh well.

Never mind that she explicitly claims not to be a deity and does no more to help you than turning Falchion back on and teleporting you to the final boss. Or that she's fully replaceable. Or that she's got no acknowledged lint to Tiki ingame save for Tiki being "her voice". Or that place in Valm called "the Dragon's Cradle" which exists solely to violate continuity. I stand by my wild theory from earlier that Awakening does not, in fact, take place on the same continent Marth is from (since Awakening's continent and all the major locations from FE1/3 are never referred to by name and there's nothing tying them together except a cosplay (doesn't count), Falchion and the Emblem (already multiples), and Tiki and Naga (have a history of world-hopping), it's a perfectly valid theory).

Oh wow. You don't seriously think that I've manage to convince myself that Lunatic+ can be beaten with minimal resetting without doing it multiple times, do you? Do you think I'd say Lunatic has no more RNG than other FEs if I've never beaten it without saves before? Have you not seen Interceptor's work on Cht.2? "having to reset until the enemies don't have the ability that enables them to one-shot literally every one of your units 75% of the time" is indeed not fair difficulty, but it's also not required to beat Lunatic(+). If you're relying on Chrom's Dual Guards, that's your strategy's problem, not the difficulty's. If you can't figure it out, that's fine, there's no shame in that. But please don't tell other people that strategies they use to great effect don't exist. It's rude and makes you look silly and more than a little salty. And seriously, you don't think those difficulties are possible without excessive grinding? By the way, memorization isn't the best thing to rely on in a difficulty where enemies get randomly generated skills each time you attempt a map and is probably why you're resetting so much. Now go read this thread twice: http://serenesforest.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=48207#entry3145464 When you're done, I want a written apology to Lunatic+ for ever implying that it's not an intelligent difficulty. If that one game wants to try to tie all the others together with a storm of references and flat-out fails at almost all of them, then it kind of is a problem. Retcons do exist, but the problem with Awakening's attempt at them is that they replace established lore with... Nothing. Usually when you retcon something, it's because a) it caused a massive fan backlash and you need to can it to control publicity damage, or b) it's in the way of new canon you want to write and you need it gone. Awakening has neither of these excuses- past FEs have been generally well received by those who played them, and Awakening inserts no new canon to replace the stuff it threw out. As a result, it just looks like the Devs forgot to research the verse they were writing for. It's 2,000 years, by the way- and another thing here is that this is the first FE to be a distant sequel to another. All the other continuums have been tied together within a generation or so. But no matter how much time has passed, none of the changes made can be explained by time alone (see all of OP and my questions earlier on this page, especially about Valm's geography). it could be 10 years or 10 billion and they still wouldn't make sense. The length of time the game says has passed also isn't usually a factor in retcons either- you'd want to measure it in time in real life since the canon in question has been set down. That's ~21 years at the most, and most of it was reaffirmed very recently with the releases of FEs 11 and 12. Again, even though that's pretty recent, it still would have been OK to can some things "so IS can do what they want"- if they had done something. They didn't.

Technically I think Validar's skin is green. But anyway... There's a line Nah says in a Scramble that might throw another spanner in the works here: Nah Yes! But I'm a manakete, so I grow slower. I mean, we've been over this before. We live far, far longer than humans, but that means we don't look our age at all... Morgan And this slower growth—does it apply to your mental age as well as your body? I mean, are you psychologically younger than a human of the same age? Nah Rrrgh... Yes. That's why I didn't want to say anything... Morgan Why not? Nah Because I don't want to be patronized! My mother always looked like a young girl, and in some ways she still was, mentally. So I heard no one ever treated her as an equal. She was always just a kid to them! This is the closest Awakening ever gets to discussing how Manaketes age. Seeing as it would be kind of a major species handicap if their young were dependent on their parents for 1-2,000 years after being born, and given that conversation, it's a fair bet that Manaketes don't mature the same way as humans with time dilation added, they have a fundamentally different pattern. So pretty much anything goes. Obviously, they're capable of reproduction starting on the same timeline as humans (Nah is able to be Morgan's mother). In terms of physical growth, I'd guess they grow at a semi-human rate until around 10, don't change from that until around 1,000, and from there it's a roughly 1:100 scale. To be perfectly clear, this is all inferred and the devs probably never considered it, but it's a model that works for all the Manaketes present in Awakening so I'm willing to go with it. As for how reproduction is physically possible, transformations could be involved- all of Awakening's Manaketes use the same full-size model. This raises a few questions for Nah (see her supports with Nowi, she isn't able to use the Dragonstone for extended periods without getting exhausted), but is preferable to the alternative. /thread That still doesn't explain Morgan.

Reclassing Chrom to Cav helps a lot if you can do it as well.

Including one that happens to look just like Morgan?

They're very different. EXP values and the like will remain the same (so will money), but you'll have to come up with different strats for training after Cht.2 because most of the vanilla Lunatic ones don't work very well anymore. Also, (and this is a danger even when doing the same mode), random stat fluctuation can and will occasionally ruin a strat, and early Seals from Anna are huge game changers but can't be counted on. Sumia can train well in Cht.7 if you get her Atk up enough. It's fairly easy for her to OHKO things there- 24 Atk and 14 Spd gets you the DMs, 21 Atk and 24 Spd gets the Myrms, 25/26 Atk and 18 Spd gets you the Cavs, 27/29 Atk and 16 Spd gets the Fighters, and 30 Atk/17 Spd for the boss. She won't be reaching all of those, but with a forged Javelin and a decent Chrom support even a low leveled Sumia should be able to get the DMs and Myrms. If her Lance rank is high enough, she can use Par.1's Killer Lance (if you get it) as well, and she should be able to take a hit from anything lacking Counter (check, though). An A support with Chrom will also have around 70 DS, so she has that too in case of Pavise+ or not enough Str. Finally, if her Lance rank is high enough, it can be worth investing in a Spear instead of a forged Javelin for her to use.

The other notable ones are various Owain!Morgans (Avatar can be part of a double Galepair while only losing 1 Mag to Laurent), various Yarne!Morgans (slightly less Str than Gerome, vastly superior Skl/Spd and Yarne supports non-dodgetank Avatar better in general), and Chrom!Inigo!Morgan (the only one who can put RK to good use). I'd probably put Yarne as the best unless there's some specific threshold you're going for, but that applies to every unit in the game. Say you see another GK, but this time with Hawkeye/Aegis+ and holding a Silver Lance++. Nah can take him down on EP without suffering a scratch and with a 98.4% chance for him to die. A GF unit would waste a whole turn doing that. So you wouldn't actually deploy a full team, you'd just deploy enough to clear out all the nasty stuff that will wear Nah down. It's much faster and more efficient than using GF on everything.

Actually, I think he was praising the Lunatc+ enemy design there. And Lunatic+ is very well designed, it's just so hard that most people mistake it for "fake difficulty" and complain about it instead of trying to solve it. Please don't be one of those people. And how, exactly, does Awakening have excellent maps?

A much easier way to get that last 10 Avo is with a generic Hit/Avo+10 skill. Fred!Nah had both Indoor Fighter and Outdoor Fighter, so she'll always have one available. One of PavGis can be kept (probably Pavise, since GKs very rarely spawn with Mages and Archers aren't usually very strong in Lunatic+). If sacrificing two skillslots is unacceptable, switching Owain to SM would provide +13 Avo as well. Speaking of Owain, he's pretty well equipped to try to dodgetank himself with Avo+10 and Lucky 7. Wyrmslayers do exist on things not named GK, but those will also have much less Atk and thus be a whole different scenario. However, when you've got a full team it's very unlikely you'll be in a situation where Nah is forced to fight more than two foes in one turn, and you can pick who those are, so the whole exercise is hypothetical- that GK is Nah's absolute worst-case scenario. She'll never actually fight one if you keep your wits about you.

The story implying nothing is kind of the whole problem.

Ah, but this is not a thread for giving up. Here, I'll show you how it's done: first, you need to think of this as a problem to be solved rather than an immovable roadblock. A good way to start would be to phrase that as a question: "what can be done about Luna+?" In this case, the biggest Luna+ threat that Nah is going to be facing in skirmishes is going to be a GK with a forged Wyrmslayer, and possibly Counter or Hawkeye as well. We don't particularly care because Owain has GF and he could take down anything that does happen to be a threat with it, but let's see how this Nah would fare against it during an EP engagement on its terms anyway. Here are the stats of all combatants: Now that all that's taken care of, time to see how this battle will play out. I'll test for Hawkeye/Counter, Luna+/Counter and Hawkeye/Luna+, because Nah won't care about the other four skills (only Aegis+ will affect her, and Owain will still maul the GK). Nah doubles. A DS+ hit to the GK does 31. A CG hit to the GK does 36+36. A non-Luna+ hit does 22 to Nah. A Luna+ hit does 61. Nah and Owain have 100% hitrates, the GK has 60 (68.4% true) hit so 48% with Hawkeye and 32.832% without. Pavise is at 55%. As we can see, only the Counter/Luna+ variant has a chance to KO Nah, and it's 14.7744% (If Nah gets Pavise in, she lives). So far, I've been hogging the spotlight with all this math, so I'll give you a turn to suggest what can be done to bring that chance of death down to zero (hint: it's possible, and doesn't require changing pairings, putting Owain up front or bringing in Rallies). Don't worry about any of the other enemies, that's what the rest of the team is there for. And remember that Nah can readjust her skills before every battle. Now go for it!