Czar_Yoshi

Avatar x Lucina > Chrom!Cynthia < Noire/Kjelle < Sumia/Cordelia < Aversa < Nowi < Olivia/Lissa/Maribelle < Tharja/Sully < Everyone else Chrom x Sumia/Maribelle/Olivia Lissa x Ricken/Libra/Henry Sully x Donnel/Gaius Sumia x Chrom/Henry Maribelle x Chrom/Virion/Lon'qu/Ricken/Libra/Henry Panne x Fred/Virion/Stahl/Vaike/Lon'qu/Gregor Cordelia x Virion/Stahl/Vaike/Lon'qu/Ricken Nowi x Virion/Stahl/Vaike/Gregor/Henry Tharja x Donnel/Gaius Olivia x Chrom/Fred/Stahl/Ricken/Libra Cherche x Virion/Stahl/Vaike/Gregor/Henry Any of those will serve you well postgame.

So you're saying it's more strategic to zerg rush him than it is to build a defensive formation that resists his strengths, and the game should support strategy by lowering his stats so zerg rushes work? I think you may be completely missing the point of Lunatic+. It's specifically designed to shut down all the various game-breaking tactics that were present in other FEs and force you to think on the fly, adapt to semi-random situations and use unconventional tactics such as unequipping yourself and fighting in formations. Of course there's a danger that you'll have to restart- it's present in all FEs that don't have fixed levels. This is not new to Lunatic+. Awakening also loads much faster and has faster gameplay than other FEs so restarting isn't nearly as much of a headache. Using just one pair for lategame chapters in Lunatic+ isn't that great, by the way. At least three combat pairs helps a lot, and isn't hard to get thanks to children. You have a lot of leeway from Cht.7 to Cht.11 and then some in the child paralogues to train up more units, and if you give that exp all to Avatar you're setting up for having very limited options lategame.

Donnel is seriously not fun to use on Lunatic+. Really. You can't even use the vanilla Lunatic strats of boxing archers and breaking weapons to get him going thanks to Pass and Luna+. It's possible to make him good, but he'll still be a net drag on your run. That's not artificial difficulty, you're just not taking measures to mitigate risk. Have Avatar fight him on EP only at range with Thunder and a Fred support, and Chrom and Lissa standing next to him. The 3 support levels they provide will give Avatar +10 Dge, reducing the Boss's Crit to 0.

Lucina x Avatar (because you said so) Morgan x Inigo/Yarne/Owain/Brady Kjelle x Inigo/Gerome/Yarne Cynthia x Owain/Brady/Laurent Severa x Inigo/Gerome/Yarne Nah x Owain/Brady/Inigo Noire x Owain/Brady/Inigo/Laurent/Gerome/Yarne Pick from there. When you consider that WTD against swords lowers Atk by 4, I'd say it's worth it. You probably can stomp everything else reliably anyway so it would just be a boost for Anna, but I'd check Thronie calcs one more time just to make sure the loss of Atk doesn't make a difference on whether or not you can kill him (both with the Throne and without). If it doesn't, I'd definitely go for All+2, if it does, SF might be slightly better. Agg in the front is doing +5 damage per attack. Let's say you've got 80 Skl (40% chance of Astra). Astra effectively multiplies your damage by 2.5 when it procs. Since it has a 40% proc rate, it needs to boost your damage by 12.5 (5/.4) per proc to break even with Agg. To hit that, you'd have to be doing 10 damage before proccing (gotta round up here). So as long as you're doing at least 10 damage, Astra will have a higher average output than Agg. There are three problems with this, though. First, you're not always leading. When you're in the back, Astra can't proc. I'll assume a best case scenario where you always end your turn with the Galeboy (so he gets to lead 66% of the battles). Astra now has an effective proc rate of 26.4%, so it now needs to boost your damage by ~19 per activation. You need a 14 damage baseline for that to work out in your favor. Second is the issue of lost Luna procs. Your Luna proc rate will drop from 80% to 48%. I'm not sure what the average Luna boost on Def is, but let's say it's 12 (that's for 50 Def. Pretty common number). So Luna now goes from doing ~9.6 damage per turn to doing ~5.76 damage per turn, which is a 3.84 damage per turn loss. To pick that up, Astra will need an additional 14.5 damage boost. Round to 34. A boost of 34 requires a base damage of 24 before procs, which will be difficult to get in some places (PavGis+ don't affect this. Don't worry about them). And finally, you run into the same problem that plagues RK setups: even if you break even in terms of averages, you're trading a higher guaranteed base in exchange for random damage spikes. That's not something you can easily weigh the cost of in numbers, but it's generally a bad thing (and in the event that I made a mistake somewhere in that math, this problem still exists and will plague you no matter how much extra Astra damage you pile on). Now, the amount of damage you need to do to break even if you're talking about swapping it for a Faire is a little less (+24, 16 base required), which is a lot more easily attainable. Anyway, there's the math, the decision is up to you.

Well, either have Avatar marry someone else or don't use all the children. If you're going for the second, you'll either want to ditch Gerome, Yarne or Laurent (being non-Galeboys). Which one it is depends on several things, but I'd personally dump Gerome (unlike Yarne, he can't get both Hit+20 and Berserker, so unless you really need the DS+ boost or 1 more Str from Vaike!Gerome then Yarne's better). Fred!gerome is also pretty terrible due to having no Faires and no good support classes, so he won't be missed. By the way, your team could be a lot stronger if you used Virion!Severa and Stahl!Yarne instead of Stahl!Severa and Kellam!Yarne. Just a suggestion. Also, I'm assuming you're going for postgame with grinding here. For ingame, it's extremely difficult to take more than five pairs through Lunatic, and postgame optimizations often mesh poorly with ingame performance. If you mainly care about clearing Grima without any grinding, go check the The Lunatic Club thread and consider dropping a lot of pairs. I can't do much for skill/class suggestions unless I know how the children are paired up. Otherwise you'll just get a super-generic cookie-cutter build.

On no holds barred it doesn't really matter, on a challenge run you'd want to focus more on the Galeboy. Apo has a few really tanky units and a lot of mooks, though. It also slightly depends on the size of your team, with a full team it's probably better to focus on the Galeboys and on a smaller one the girls (because the whole point of small/large teams is consolidating/spreading power, so it fits with what the team is supposed to do). Luna/Astra is pretty good, but if Gaius!Kjelle is doing something particularly useful with that extra Spd then it's probably not worth trying to get him back on Noire. Vengeance is just fine, it's just a different way of boosting damage than normal procs.

So this is strictly a postgame team? First off, LB is a skill and it needs to be equipped to do anything, so you're going to have to make room for it on all your units. You can automatically get rid of all your Counters and Lethalitys because they have no effect in Apo, but you'll still need to do some shuffling around. DS+ is also mandatory and is one of the best skills in the game. You also need to pair up all your children. Having S supports on all your combatants is extremely important because it pushes your DS rate from around 85% to ~95%, which is a massive difference. Excluding Avatar and Morgan, there are 6 girls and 6 boys, so if you don't want to bench a girl to make room for Morgan (not always a bad thing), your Avatar will need to marry one of the 2nd gen units. For your skills themselves, concentrate a lot less on self-healing/defensive skills and more on offensive skills. Most stuff in Apo will 2-3HKO you regardless of what your Def looks like, so offense is much more important than defense- you want more Luna/Faires/Aggressor (if you have it) and less Sol/Renewal/PavGis. It's also important to consider where offense is needed- supporting units can't use procs, so someone like Laurent (who has no Galeforce and will never want to be up front) won't see any effect from Luna, Renewal or Lifetaker. Also, never run Astra if you're not also using Luna. Just Luna will do more damage overall than just Astra. For your Asset/Flaw, HP doesn't actualy lower your stats "more" than any other flaw- all flaws give -5 to your total stat pool, only most of them give -3 to one stat and -1 to another two. It's best to pick an asset that boosts multiple stats that you want and a flaw that lowers multiple stats you don't care about. There's a chart here: old.serenesforest.net/fe13/char_max.html You want to avoid using both Luna and Sol at the same time. When you have both of them, the game first checks to see if Sol will activate, and it'll only check for Luna if Sol doesn't work. Because of this, it's impossible for Luna to have an activation rate above 25% (at exactly 50 Skl), and that's not acceptable for Apo. You also want to avoid using anything other than Brave weapons, so stay away from Manakete and especially Taguel. So, assuming you lack all DLC except RaR3 and Apo, here are a few changes you could make to your skillsets (keeping the same classes except for Nah and Yarne): Most of the +Hit skills are filler where other skills would go if you had them (All+2 and Aggressor in particular are important). These are also kind of generic sets since you don't currently have any 2nd gen pairings to build around.

No, I was agreeing with you. The difficulty is already brushing the "too hard to sell well" threshold, any more and it would lose sales quickly.

And a lot of people do that already. Even on this forum.

Problem: Apo's enemy data isn't easily visible ingame due to the multiple wave design. If the difficulty was turned up so that only a perfectly prepared team could cut it, you'd be in big trouble- make a team designed to quash Wave 1, then get hit by something in Wave 2 you couldn't see coming or plan for. If your team isn't capable of dealing with it, you'll need to make tweaks to your team so you can take it- and minmax a whole new team for each wave that you don't get lucky on. You could just look the data up online, but forcing players to look stuff up tends to lower games' receptions. Or you could just brute force it with Dual Guards, but that would be more frustrating than Lunatic+ earlygame without a plan. There's also the problem that 99.9% of people who play this game either couldn't do the required threshold calcs and simulations, or wouldn't care enough to spend weeks planning and executing the whole thing, but that's another story... Anyway, you should do some Normal Apo challenges sometime, and see how far down it's possible to push that. It doesn't have the same ring to it as S.Apo, but there are a handful of things missing from it (Counter, Luna+, Vantage+, and time limits) that open up a very broad range of possibilities for different stunts.

It's actually voice only. He never says that in the dialogue, he just has a voice clip for it. And it's glorious. One of my battle save files is permanently dedicated to a save right before him. Oh, I forgot that I also usually turn the voices back to English for Cht.1 to hear Marth's minor gaffe. Only sometimes though, it gets old a lot quicker than Cervantes (for those who don't remember/know, when Marth is introducing himself, the voice clips go "You may call me Marth." "Really?" "No.").

Ingame means the numbered chapters (Grima is only included if you're doing nogrind). Anything you do after that, unless you immediately proceed to Grima, is postgame. Please don't accuse posters of lying. And Shadowgift is impractical in most scenarios- you'll have higher output as a Sorc with TF than you will as a Sage with Shadowgift, so it's impractical as an offensive skill, and Sorc has the best defenses out of any Tome using class so it's impractical as a defensive skill also. The main use of it is to spam Mire as a DF or Valkyrie (DF does it while hiding over inaccessible terrain to solo difficult maps, Valkyrie does it in tandem with +Mov skills and Galeforce to extend its Rescue range).

Not doubting that it happened, just saying it wasn't the RNG's fault.

Yeah, Laurent won't like Vaike too much. Virion is one of the best fathers for Severa and Yarne, and a strong option for Nah, Brady and Gerome. He has some nice niches in being the highest Skl father with Archer and the highest Spd father with Tomefaire, and his mods in general clash with nobody and are useful to everyone. He gets some flak because he doesn't have a proc and is pretty bad ingame, but there are a lot of children who want exactly what he has.

Yes, always. Their English quotes make it impossible for me to take them seriously, and some (OK, most, but especially Grima) units simply sound better in Japanese. The only time I ever switch it back is for Cervantes.

Hey. Virion is one of the best fathers in the game. Don't trash talk his genes. Fred hurts Brady a lot. Gregor and Donnel are both useless on Inigo. Nah is the biggest waste of Lon'qu. Kjelle gets nothing from Fred and almost nothing from Stahl, though Sully hurts Lucina almost as much as Maiden. But it's hard to actually make pairings that are bad when Awakening's metagame revolves around good and better, not good and bad. So is this going to be on Lunatic+ or Normal? Because you kind of said both just now.

-Skl is a good flaw if you only care about ingame, -Lck is plausible if you're going for postgame (but very annoying). Spd is the most powerful asset, but Def is far easier to use with brute force and almost as good. Just feed her as many kills as possible (optimally all but two out of the first three chapters) and let Veteran do the rest.

Use Avatar, not Fred. You may have to restart. To save Kellam, have Chrom walk out and recruit him, then pair up with him and have Kellam walk both of them back to safety. Then you can have him do something on turn 2 that doesn't involve getting him killed (I usually have him be a support).

Dump Fred, but if you've gotten Cordelia this far you should probably keep her. She has an easy Galeforce passdown and if you decide you don't need her later after all, she can easily be retasked to a flying Staffbot, something you can never have too many of in Lunatic. If you're building support between Fred and Cordelia, get them to S before you drop him (but don't give him any kills anymore) since his level is high enough to pass down Luna.

Oh, he says that to the guys too.

Basilio asking Tiki if she's "slipping back from a naughty night in town". Or him asking Tharja that. Or Lucina, or Morgan, or pretty much anyone, actually (except Emmeryn. He's more polite to her). I can't believe the ESRB let them get away with that.

Shadowgift isn't useful in normal combat. It's for cheesing maps on higher difficulties and pulling off LTC stunts. Miriel passes a Mag mod of 3 and Maribelle passes a Mag mod of 2. Your Brady only has higher mag because of a different father. Swords/Axes/Lances have no ranged Braves, and enemy Res is generally lower than enemy Def so Tomes often do more damage despite having lower mt.

Please don't blame the RNG for things it's not guilty of. So the general has 12 HP. I'll assume this was one of the mooks, since the boss only attacks at 1 range and you've got no reason to not fight him at range. His Atk is now 112, so your survival threshold should be 28 Def and 36 Spd. With LB and Rally, it should be impossible for you to die from that. So... That's not a case of being screwed by the RNG, it's an avoidable tactical error. Anyway, I once got two Lethality crits in consecutive EPs when both had activation rates of around 10%. All of which were completely unnecessary, but glorious nonetheless.

That's... Pretty much a standard set for Henry!Nah. The idea is that her husband leads, takes one kill, and then she takes the second. It works better than having her as a hard support in terms of offensive power, though Nah won't have as much room for Henry's large pool of utility skills. If I'm not here very often over the next few days, it might have something to do with a certain game's demo becoming available on the eShop. Maybe.

Desensitized to death due to living in a kill-or-be-killed world? That kind of thing could happen, but it tends to carry somewhat obvious psychological side-effects, which a good portion of the cast clearly don't have. Actually, the most unstable of the bunch tend to be the children, which makes sense in the context of their future. So I could see them telling jokes while mowing down enemies due to extreme apathy/insanity, but I have a hard time buying that the same excuse applies to the likes of Donnel and Lissa.