Czar_Yoshi

Clear Secret Apo with no Limit/Agg/Rally and say that again. In the meantime, refer to this post: Yes, every unit is a one-man army in Awakening, but an unoptimized unit is incredibly weak compared to their maximum potential. Optimization for ingame is very different from postgame optimization, but it's still important on Lunatic(+) nogrind.

Alright, you listed Henry twice, forgot Sumia and Tharja gives Noire, not Cynthia. Might want to fix those. Apart from that... Chrom x Olivia is good. Make sure to pass Inigo Galeforce. Kellam x Sully gives no Galeforce and redundant Knight. Sully's Def is also too bad for Kjelle to be defensive. Sully's generally accepted best pairing is Donnel, the only other uncontested pairing in the game is Tharja x Gaius. You didn't mention Sumia, but she really should go with Chrom or Henry. I personally consider Stahl x Cordelia to be outclassed by Lon'qu x Cordelia (Severa gets more Spd/Mag and worse Def, along with Breakers), but Stahl is definitely not bad. Henry x Lissa is generally considered inferior to Libra x Lissa because Henry is in higher demand elsewhere, but it's not bad. Donnel x Nowi: Nah is going to wind up supporting with anyone but Avatar as a father, save Donnel for Sully. Frederick x Panne: This is arguably Panne's best pairing. Ricken x Maribelle: All Brady needs is a father who doesn't lower his Mag, if Ricken isn't needed elsewhere then this is fine. Vaike x Cherche: This is arguably Cherche's best pairing. Henry x Miriel: double class overlap and Laurent doesn't get Vantage, which is what he really wants. Swap for Lon'qu, Stahl or Gregor. Avatar: Lucina is generally regarded as Avatar's best pairing, though Avatar x Nowi is the only way to make Nah a lead unit. Do note that Avatar x Nowi requires benching a girl somewhere, so don't do it unless you're prepared for that. Cynthia (do you mean Noire?) works, but the best Cynthia is Chrom!Cynthia who is completely eclipsed by her sister Lucina as a wife for Avatar, so I don't recommend her. Anna is bad. I suppose it boils down to personal taste between Lucina and Nowi.

Owain's pronunciation: I say it exactly the way he says it in game (with the voices set to English, at least). Partner defeats enemy/Owain is healed: "Owain needs no aid!"

All Breakers isn't a very good idea because +50 Hit/Avo is all you get from it. The same effect could be achieved with five +10 Hit/Avo skills, which is a waste of time because LB outclasses all of them from the +20 Hit/Avo you get from the stat boosts alone. Nostanks typically use LB/AT/Vengeance/Swordbreaker/Vantage or Galeforce (SB is solely for RaR3 Jaffar, who has Lethality).

Well, first off you'd swap Tomebreaker for LB and hold an S.Jolt for an extra 20 Avo (assuming Streetpass). Generally when doing Avo stack it's better to find a specific target you want to dodge (such as Apo's Nightmare Sniper or Anna) rather than throwing out Breakers all over the place. A guaranteed +50 Avo against any weapon at the cost of five skillslots is sort of silly when you can just take Lucky 7, Quick Burn (for anything but Apo), Underdog (DLC!Leif), Prescience and LB, for a total of +85 first-turn Avo against any weapon without Breakers. That gives an impression of what you can do with one/two breakers against a single opponent. Lon'qu!Severa in particular is good for Avo stack thanks to her +6 Spd mod and access to all the Breakers. With Patience, Avo+10 and a Breaker, she can work as a dodgetank in Apo even during runs that forgo things like LB and Rally.

A couple of things bugging me here... First, Aether trumps all that stuff even without Chrom's other boosts. The only thing that can make an Aether/Luna unit not incredibly awesome is a lack of Galeforce, and Severa has that. Second, Stahl!Severa honestly isn't that great. Vantage/Vengeance? Outclassed by Lon'qu!Severa, who has lower Def and higher Mag (and who also has Breakers). Astra/Luna/Galeforce? Outclassed by Vengeance/Galeforce, which she can do with any father. Back on topic, Sumia x Virion would be able to have fun with Breakers, Sumia x Lon'qu would yield 7(!) Spd (and Breakers), and Sumia x Vaike/Gregor/Donnel would let Cynthia be a real, authentic Hero (in Gregor's case, with her choice of Faires). Chrom wouldn't go with anyone else besides his normal three and Cordelia. Chrom x Cordelia could actually be pretty interesting by giving Lucina Vengeance, allowing 100% DS Vengeance a lot more freely (no Vantage though).

Actually Gerome does get Sol, though he likely won't use it. Warrior will also work as a pairup class if you don't like the way Generals work, though General is slightly better (+2 Str on the support > +2 Str on the lead). Assassin might also work well. If you're using female Avatar x Chrom, you could also just bench Gerome. I don't recommend that pairing, but if you do do it then you'll have 7 boys and 6 girls to pair off, and someone will need to get benched.

You're mixing up Barbarian and Fighter. Fighter promotes to Hero, not Berserker.

I usually build them more defensively since I never use them in Apo (where Def doesn't work) and they have decent Def/Res. My main Grandmaster set is female with LB/AT/GF/Swordbreaker/Ignis and is mostly for RaR3, holding Superior Jolt, Book of Naga, Forseti, Ragnell and Sol. S.Jolt and Ragnell are for tanking enemy Tomebreaker, BoN is for EP when there's no significant Tomebreaker, Sol is for sometimes getting HP on PP, and Forseti is just for kicks. SB is mostly for the Tomebreaker Swordmasters and Jaffar, Ignis helps get around random PavGis activations.

Well, this topic took a turn for the strange.

You asked what people do when they're Grandmasters, not why they're Grandmasters. The general consensus is that Grandmaster isn't a very good final class because all-round units are generally worse than specialized ones.

Protip: Cht.4 Lucina can't critical. At all. The Masked Marth cut-in uses her "normal" voice, which would be a spoiler so the devs just disabled it. It still appears on Lunatic+ if she has Luna+, but that requires a clear of the game to unlock so they didn't care.

Both. The only reason I use GM over Sage, Assassin or Hero is for the ability to switch between physical and magical, and it would be silly to lock myself into one or the other.

Yeah, the other one has pretty much nothing.

I'll give that a try, thanks. One of my copies is digital so the second method won't work for it, though.

Won't that destroy all your DLC...?

By you, maybe, but I doubt it's the general consensus among the community. Eh, I don't really care. Call it whatever you want, just keep in mind that most other people don't follow that particular convention.

You have seen the Avatar's ending, right? DLC skills and spotpass characters generally aren't considered part of nogrind, by the way.

This method is slightly overrated because 3dses don't re-streetpass instantly- it usually takes around a day for my team to show up again. If you really need more Second Seals now (which is massive overkill even for Lunatic+), it's slightly faster to farm the event tiles in the Scramble Pack for Rift Doors. There aren't any Second Seals you can get there, but the chance of getting a Rift Door is a little higher, you can get more tries per turn, and the other loot is better in general.

Cht.4 has a deployment cap of 6. There's honestly not that much difference between lowmanning or not, and since you can go bananas with Spotpass stuff on it it's probably the easiest chapter in Lunatic(+) either way.

Well, that was slightly morbid. You better hope Ana doesn't take offense. Gangrel has the honor of being the one aesthetic reason why I ever play Casual mode. ARRRGH, HOW ANNOYING! How DARE they defeat me!

When you put it that way, I completely agree. Well, the problem with grinding is that it's very hard to specify exactly how much "some grinding" is. Some people, myself included, would have enjoyed a difficulty using Lunatic+ skills and Hard stats/distribution, because when you look at them those skills really are meant to encourage highmanning and the only reason it doesn't work well on Lunatic+ is the same reason it doesn't work on Lunatic: you get zerg rushed. Rather than trying to find a balanced amount to raise the stats of your units by, just uniformally cut the power and numbers of the enemies.

A problem shared by the entire series is still a problem. The reason it has no aesthetic appeal is because FE games in general have a large cast that at least have unique names, portraits, some statistics, and permadeath, and lowmanning means you don't use that cast and instead stick to one or two units. Awakening compounds the problem by having supports and a marriage/inheritance system with a greater aesthetic payload the more units you use. So while I can lowman past FEs (and make them easier) if I want to, I highly prefer to use a full team instead, simply because it's more fun playing with 10 unique characters than one unique character. Trying not to lowman with Awakening heavily scales up the difficulty/randomness in Lunatic(+), and that's something I have a problem with (granted, if I'm playing Lunatic(+) I'm not doing it for the characters).

Again, my point isn't that Wyvern Panne is slow, it's that she's slower than Thief Panne. She's still better overall, just not quite as dodgy.