Czar_Yoshi

Sacred Stones has unlimited grinding via the Tower of Valni and random skirmishes.

You're counting Rally twice. General gives +10, all Rallies give another +10. And don't forget that you might need to sacrifice some Def to reach 66 Spd. There are also other Snipers that don't have Luna+ (most likely the Longbow ones in Normal Apo, those things are nice to have high Def for). The video you saw was probably showing those.

Don't pair Avatar and Chrom if you don't want to solo it, because they will turn it onto a solo. I'm growing to like Chrom/Sumia and Avatar/Cordelia for Hard thanks to giving six easy Galeforces by Valm. He's mostly a problem for people who don't know about him, since he looks like any other Sniper from the map and is extremely easy to underestimate. If you're rushing and trying to kill all the Snipers at once, especially with an improperly prepared team, it's pretty easy to use up all your Tome users on the mooks to avoid their Counter, and then realize that your last possibly slow physical pairs aren't able to take NS out on their own too late to rescue all your skirmishers away. Then EP comes around and he splats someone... Anyone who knows about him in advance usually has no trouble with him, thanks to knowing to take him down first, have a 75 Spd pair on hand, and not leave someone in his range "because he's just one enemy". People who don't check enemy stats (as in, aren't using the full view for the bottom screen) have an especially high chance of getting curbstomped. Anna is mostly easy because her AI doesn't fit well- if she charged someone with that Brave Lance and a 1-range Counter, they'd have a pretty high chance of kicking the bucket. She also has range issues. When she's using the Spear, unless she can double or has a hurt target it's very very rare for her to get a kill.

Well, it was pretty useful during my Base Chrom N.Apo solo... And in my current layout for a two-unit access of S.Apo, it raises the success rate from ~1.5% to ~4.5%, though it prevents me from bringing Res+10 for the Griffons.

Ways to survive an encounter with the Nightmare Sniper with 100% success: Have 254+ Avo (he lacks Hawkeye), Have 100% Aegis and 66+ Spd, Have 100% Miracle and 66+ Spd, Have 108+ Def and 66+ Spd (or 102+ and be on the Throne), or Don't let him fight you. The last is obviously preferrable, though since he has 70 Spd, 70 Def and PavGis+ and Dragonskin (and Vantage+), that requires a pigpile if you're not prepared. Playing on Casual is also an option, so you can get back all the stuff he kills.

Because the Nightmare Sniper has 76 Str and a Brave Bow++ (96 Atk) and Luna+.

If you were talking to me, Sniper doesn't have the skill DS+, but DS rate is also boosted by the unit's Skl, and that's what Snipers do have. Sniper has 48 Skl and gives +8 Skl, so a support Sniper boosts the lead's DS rate by the highest amount in the game. Lethality is just too unreliable for any situation in which you don't want to be resetting repeatedly.

Donnel is unable to Second Seal out of Villager so he gets 10 fewer levels than everyone else (with Villager's bad growths and caps, nonetheless) so his stats will be below average when it comes time to pass them down, resulting in subpar child stats. They'll eventually catch up thanks to Aptitude, but it's just not worth it. Gregor comes as a Merc with C Swords so he's a good unit to just drop into your party with little help, and he can also reach C with Nowi in one chapter, making him good for high deployment runs.

It depends what difficulty you're playing on. If you're playing Normal/Hard, it's a strategy game not too different from any other FE until you learn how to play, at which point it becomes press-start-to-win. If you're playing Lunatic, it's an RNG fest until you learn how to play, and then it becomes press-start-to-win as well. But on Lunatic+... It's an RNG fest until you learn how to play (which almost nobody does, because it's so hard), at which point it becomes a game of precision reacting on the spot to chaotic circumstances, which is extremely difficult and extremely fun. Once you get past Cht.3, that is. Compared to the other FEs, it's less about ingame and more about postgame. The final DLC map, Apo, is a test to see if you've been grinding your units when you play with no restrictions, and a massive math problem when you play with restrictions where single stat points make huge differences (but it's still 95% preparation and 5% performance, a good team still has the map won before you enter). Basically if you try to play Normal/Hard like a standard FE and purposely ignore all the broken things (lowmanning, Dark Mages, Robin spam, infinite grinding), it'll be fun. If you try to play Lunatic like a standard FE, it won't be fun. Lunatic+ is another story and requires a completely different style of play, but is very interesting. Robin: pretty much a canonical Mary Sue, who also happens to have the most overpowered ability in the game. The biggest offenders are Cht.14 (Robin massacres 100,000 enemy troops without so much as batting an eyelid), 23 (Robin the Self-Insert pulls off a Gambit Roulette behind your back, setting up a Deus Ex Machina complete with a nice plothole) and the Endgame (the game attempts to avoid another Deus Ex Machina by foreshadow the ending and fails, spoiling its own ending two chapters in advance... And then tries to play it for drama anyway and fails again). Expect plenty of plotholes and The Power of Friendship. He/she's also capable of romancing every single unit in the game (except your child).

I prefer Brawlcustommusic.com for background stuff. If you're not planning on using this for Apo, Berserker can work with a +Hit skill (Inigo's got both Lucky 7 and Quick Burn). He doesn't have any decent procs (Luna/Vengeance) so low Skl won't matter as much there. Galeforce Axefaire Lucky 7 Swordbreaker/Quick Burn/Sol Despoil/Armsthrift/Deliverer/Str+2

There's no perfectly optimal setup, but you could probably still stomp the game with Chrom x Avatar-F solo given that it's just Hard (add in Morgan + Lucina once you get them). Nightmare Sniper used Brave Bow! Morgan took 118 damage! Morgan fainted! One does not simply tank the enemies of Apo. The only practical defensive threshold is 74 Res (Mire tinks you). Even if you add Rally Def and a General S support to that Morgan for 20 more Def (and assuming she manages to hit 66 Spd to not be doubled), you're still taking 98 damage from him. If you're not going for Apo and want Manakete tanks though, use Nowi x Avatar, because the more the merrier.

To give them a shirt? That's Wyvern Lord. Griffon gives Lancebreaker.

Since we're assuming no DLC, IR won't matter. Acrobat is also good for all of one map (Cht.24). All other maps with lots of obstacle terrain usually make it easy to just walk right past, or come before it's (reasonably) possible to have Acrobat.

I suppose it could actually run a pair through a battle with every single enemy using Luna, then Vengeance, and do a comparison of average win% for offensive uses. VV itself though is a set that some people just don't like (or don't have the skill to use), dealing with it would likely require a specific player input determining whether or not it would be used (and if it is, the AMR would either use a pre-made or custom-built pair and instead focus on ways to set up their Vengeance). But I doubt I could make something that complex without dedicating a serious amount of time to the project. Anyway I see it as being something primarily useful for turning a ragtag bunch of misfits into a decently optimized team for Apo. More sophisticated goals such as making a pair specifically for killing a certain enemy are nice, but that pair won't do anything if the AMR spits it out and the player doesn't know how to use it (and if they do know how to use it, they could likely come up with it themself). It's not like the AMR could generate a turn-by-turn movement guide for the team, complete with contingency for all possible RNG events, is it...? Actually, that's interesting. I wonder exactly how much RNG it's possible to remove from Apo. Could it be possible to cut it down so much that one could reliably clear Apo in the exact same way twice? Could it be cut down so much that you could tell in advance exactly how many weapon uses could be used before entering, and set up your weapons so the last unit breaks their last weapon killing the last enemy? Could you clear Apo without looking at the screen? But that's getting off-topic.

Yeah, I think an AMR for Awakening is possible. Most of those limitations could be overcome with a combination of doing stuff in the right order and a weighted RNG. It would assume a goal of Secret Apo with No Holds Barred (so 20 deployment and no banned skills, and it's almost impossible to bring down a team with one or two bad pairings). Possible inputs would be Avatar's gender and Asset/flaw, as well as any currently existing parent pairings and child pairings. It wouldn't be able to give anything really unconventional like my 100% DS team or advanced like something requiring specific damage values for Vengeance and wouldn't be much help for ingame, but should be able to build a standard cookie-cutter team out of the available resources. I'm almost tempted to try making one myself.

Ask Mr. Robot.

I'd add a button on the first page to check/uncheck all skills/classes in case someone is more interested in not using one or two bad classes than only using one or two good ones.

This is a No Braves run so it's Valflame only, but the same principal applies.

That's the typical Lucina build, yes.

So basically it checks all the units for whether they have the selected skill/class?

Make her a dedicated lead (with Yarne or Gerome supporting).

BK isn't, as long as you know what you want to do with them. Despite having very low stats, they're tied with several others for the highest +Skl pairup boost in the game (different from Sniper's DS boost) and the only one to give that big of a boost that also gives +Mov. They're often superior to Snipers for acting as Sage supports as well, thanks to not wasting a Str support (mostly Chrom does this), though only Archer -> Bow Knights have that niche (Merc -> BKs also have Hero, which has higher Str and Skl with the same Skl/Spd boost). They're also the only 8-Mov bow user, which is very useful for Lunatic+, as well as hunting down thieves without nuking a large amount of enemies that you could feed to your weak units instead.

Yes, it is. The more the merrier, so don't stop at just one.

Fair enough. To me they're just Grandmasters on wheels with much better distribution and defensive pairup boosts. Outclassed for Apo, but near the top of the stack for Lunatic(+) no DLC postgame. Dunno if you want that to be answered, but... GK has -the worst- Skl in the game. Even with weapon triangle control, they're plagued by Hitrate, DS and proc rate deficiencies (including Aegis). And they have the second lowest Spd in the game, so Spd really is an issue for them (they're even slower than Manaketes!)- especially since the one unit who's both physically oriented, has enough Spd to overcome their deficit, and has a niche in playing normally slow classes, Lon'qu!Severa, doesn't even get GK. Weapon Triangle is nice, but it doesn't matter postgame when you're using a Faire, because you won't want to drop your Faire type. Thanks to their dual Beast/Armor weakness, they're also vulnerable to three common different physical effective weapons, which doesn't help them as tanks. In terms of pairup bonuses Paladin curbstomps them, they have a 1 Str/1 Def/1 Mov edge on Paladin, but Paladin has a +4 Spd/Skl edge on them. The +Mov doesn't really matter either because it's better to have a 6/8 Mov team than a 7/7 Mov one. BK has a couple of niches, but the big difference in terms of general usage is that BK has the second lowest total stat caps in the game (beaten by... Wait for it... GK! Which is funny because General has the highest total stat caps in the game, not counting Manakete's Dragonstone boosts), while Snipers both have Longbow access (there are a couple of bosses in Apo that can be a pain to take out without help from these, especially for new players) and are the best Dual Strike boosting support in the game. Being 2-range locked isn't purely a bad thing either, it makes you immune to Counter. Taguel has no ranged options, and thus will get hit by it every time even on Player Phase when a ranged unit could take it down safely.

Yes you can. It's a lot more complicated, but Chrom can still do the Water Trick to hog all the Prologue exp (even on Lunatic). There's not much to hog, but he still gets one or two levels out of it.