Czar_Yoshi

No DLC is a "must" in this game. Everything can be cleared without it. Water trick: you're supposed to go into the water after the bottom wave is dead. Out of those, Fred usually gets the Myrms and Avatar gets the Barbs, and who gets the Mage depends on skill distribution and enemy movement.

Staffbots should use LB, TF/LF, Mov+1, and All+2, and hold Valflame or a Shockstick. Bond doesn't stack with itself and isn't that good. Don't put Renewal/Galefore/Miracle on your staffbots, they shouldn't ever see combat, much less have a risk of death. Healtouch is outclassed by Mag boosting skills because those also boost your Rescue range, which is the primary job of staffbots.

Use Lon'qu!Laurent, pair him up with Morgan or Avatar (only A is necessary), both as Sages, give him a forged Wilderwind, drop him to 1HP, swap LB for Vengeance, get a Barracks Boost in Skl (Mag doesn't matter) and I'm pretty sure it's possible to EP OHKO any enemy in Secret Apo with 55 or less Lck/Res with no Limit/Agg/Rally. Some numbers: Laurent's Skl: 43(base) +5(mods) +7(Sage support) +4(Barracks) +2(tonic) =61. Laurent's effective crit: 30(base) +50(Wilderwind) +20(Wrath) +10(Focus) +10(Gamble) +15(Support/DS+) +10(Solidarity) +10(Anathema) =155, enough for 100% on anything with 55 Lck or less. Laurent's atk (+3/0/15 Wilderwind): 46(base) +4(mods) +9(Sage support) +5(Wilderwind) +2(WRB) +2(tonic) +42(Vengeance) =110. He needs to do 27 damage before the crit to KO an 80 HP enemy, so 54 before Dragonskin, so he can OHKO anything with 56 Res or less. The beefiest non-Aegis+ enemy with 80HP and 55 Lck is Wave 4's Sage with 55 Res. If you add Rally, you can either switch Laurent to a Ruin Sorc to get rid of the Wilderwind/Barracks requirement, or add Nightmare Sniper and his cohort to the list of things you can kill.

Since nobody else is going to answer... Yeah, "canon" pairings aren't that good in this game. 100% critical?

Outside of Lunatic(+) and postgame, tonics are too expensive for what they are (+2 in one stat), so I don't see a reason to explicitly ban them when you probably wouldn't use them anyway. No Second Seals/Rescue/Paralogues/wireless/DLC with full deployment, routing all chapters except 21 and at least five Gen 1 marriages is my idea of how to make Hard interesting. You can ban Risen too if you like, but I like them (as long as they're not spammed).

There's an extra enemy on the RHS so this is usually harder.

That's kind of the point.

I'm not sure what you're doing here. If Lucina is supporting Laurent while Laurent sweeps with Celica's, swap Avatar for Maribelle and let Avatar marry 2nd gen for an extra pairing. Lon'qu!Severa: I don't like her as a Sorc, as a Hero she makes a great dodgetank but I usually have her as a Wyvern Lord because she can still reasonably hit 75 Spd.

Chrom begs to differ.

+Spd/-Lck works for Nowi. You won't have any standout stats, but no bad ones either. Both Lissa and Sumia have -2 Str mods, Sumia has 0 Mag and Lissa has 2. Magic is generally more powerful than physical as well because enemies tend to favor Def and there are no 1-2 range Brave physical weapons. They just perform all around better as Sages (or Dark Flier in Cynthia's case). While that 4 damage difference doesn't seem like much (2 with Cynthia), there's absolutely no reason to use a unit over an otherwise identical unit with 2-4 more atk, and thus it's actually a crippling flaw. Reasoning for Sumia x Henry: Sumia's pairs are limited to Chrom, Avatar, Gaius, Fred and Henry. Gaius is permanently attached to Tharja (and gives class overlap if you do put him with Sumia), Frederick gives horrible mod clash with Cynthia and Avatar is also busy elsewhere, leaving Chrom and Henry. Chrom doesn't hurt Sumia's Mag, gives her more Spd and Aether, and she already has a great skillset from Sumia in LB/GF/TF/Luna/filler (Aether from Chrom). Henry, on the other hand, boosts her Mag and gives her Anathema as a support skill and Vengeance as an alternate proc. Passing Galeforce doesn't do anything except speed up training very slightly if the child can already get it. All parents who give all of their classes to their child don't matter, so pass the best skill for training you have at the time.

Not 12 times, 6 times (you want to kill everything before it gets a change to attack, especially with VV because you're at 1HP). The maximum number of attacks in a round of combat is actually 28 (Astra) though Aether's 16 is more potent (neither of those can be done with 100% reliability though). But your ally's attacks pierce PavGis so if your foe has that then it essentially doubles their attack rate again.

To do that you calculate the probability of each possible outcome and add together the probability of the ones resulting in success. In your case, winning scenarios have either 2, 3 or 4 DSes. Since there are more failure scenarios than winning ones, it's faster to calculate the probability of a failure and subtract from 1. Fail scenarios: Whiff + Whiff + Whiff + Whiff: 6.25% DS + Whiff + Whiff + Whiff: 6.25% Whiff + DS + Whiff + Whiff: 6.25% Whiff + Whiff + DS + Whiff: 6.25% Whiff + Whiff + Whiff + DS: 6.25% Since you have exactly 50% DS rate (the game rounds everything down), this becomes a lot easier to calculate- each of those events has a .5^4 chance to activate, or 6.25%. Multiply that by 5 (the number of events) and you get 31.25%, your probability of failure. Success is therefore 68.75%.

Several things wrong here: Supporting units bypass Pavgis+, Counter, and strike twice as much as lead units, therefore their offense is of a higher priority to boost than that of the lead unit (you can still KO without strong DSes, you'll just be a little more at the mercy of the RNG). Thus, if you put all your assets into boosting the non-GF unit's offense, they won't be able to take a hit any better than the lead (who's also decked out for doing damage)- look at those Berserker/Sage defenses. Now, you could choose to build the other unit defensively, but then you can't have the lead unit hit like the truck you're calling for. Second, defending on Secret Apo is useless. Either you survive EP with Vantage and enough offense to crush anything before it can touch you, or you bail with Rescue/GF and don't get attacked. If you -do- get attacked, you won't be able to take much Luna+ and Hawkeye before you have to retreat- the Nightmare Sniper is in fact untankable, and the only ways to survive a round of combat with him when he can attack with no chance of death are 100% Aegis and 244+ Avo. Now, on double Gale pairs, it can be useful to keep one unit at very low HP for Vengeance and have them hide behind the other everywhere else. This could be done as well with only one GF, if you wanted to build your other unit with procs and stuff with the intent of getting them out of the way during EP with Rescue, but it's impractical because procs don't work from the back. Basically, the front unit should always be decked out with procs and the back unit with atk boosters, switching them around causes a much lower damage output. It's worth doing that on double Gale pairs because you get an extra kill, but on a single gale pair it's better to have the units dedicated to their roles. That way, instead of killing with the GF unit, switching to the back unit and getting another kill before fleeing, you can just get two kills with the front unit before fleeing. The one time it does make sense to have GF on the support unit is with Lucina x a VV tank, because the tank is built for EP, but Lucina can still be used to gale down a threat you wouldn't want to face on EP (for example, a Counter Warrior on wave 1).

I suppose you could run Despoil. Depending on how much your weapons cost per use, how high your Lck is and how many kills you're making on Player Phase, it can generate more gold than Armsthrift saves. Counter is an option, you shouldn't be taking too much damage with LB but enemy hitrates should still be decent and it might save a few weapon uses. Lucky 7 works wonders if you're going the "fling yourself into a mosh pit" route, effectively cancelling the +Hit boost enemies get from their forges. It still may not be enough to dodgetank without a Gate, but is an option. You could also pack Anathema just for kicks (extra Crit). Ignis really is the best use of your slot, I'm just trying to come up with other options. Maybe another proc (Astra/Lethality) just for the flashiness?

Manakete Morgan and Nah don't really benefit from any of the male-exclusive skills when Manaketes, so pass something to make training easier (probably Despoil, Axefaire works too). Nowi can pass down whatever. Inigo needs Galeforce, Lucina doesn't matter (you could pass Lck+4 because she can't get it otherwise, but it won't be used). Chrom's passdowns are fixed. Lissa passes Galeforce, Stahl passes anything. Miriel doesn't matter much, but I'd go with DS+. Her husband doesn't matter. Sumia doesn't matter, if paired with Henry I'd have him pass down Axefaire or Despoil (again, for training). Cordelia and Lon'qu both don't matter. Cherche should pass down DS+ and Vaike doesn't matter. Tharja doesn't matter, Gaius should pass Sol (mostly for training). Sully doesn't matter. Underdog is probably Donnel's best bet. Panne should pass Str+2 or Swordbreaker if not marrying a Wyvern husband (Frederick is typically used), her husband doesn't matter. Maribelle should pass Galeforce and her husband can pass anything.

+Mag/-Def is great for postgame and absolutely terrible until you reach the outrealm gate. If you want to do it anyway, good luck, though I'd at least recommend playing through Lunatic with a good asset/flaw several times before attempting that. However, without DLC there's not much to optimize for other than ingame, so you're shooting yourself in the foot with no payoff by choosing a flaw that's bad for ingame (unless you're intending to buy more DLC soon). I'd advise +Def/-Lck or +Def/-Skl instead.

Honestly, LB is so strong that you could probably do this with unforged Wind tomes, especially with Ignis. You'll get Bullion from the Risen anyway, so you can keep one forge (or a normal Celica's) and several normal Arcfires on hand and just pull out the forge in a pinch if it becomes important.

I'll need a new file anyway for different pairings. I want to be able to completely change my skillset (eg: go from VV sweeping to Gale/Luna PPO). Going in with high exp just gives me two reclasses per unit, which I'll already be using multiple times for the purpose of having the weapons I need equippable.

WRB = Weapon Rank Bonus. Basically you get a small bonus (OK, it can actually be quite significant) to atk and hit depending on your weapon type and weapon rank. The WRB is cancelled if you're at a weapon disadvantage, but there's no weapon triangle for Tomes so you pretty much always have it. A Tomes gives +2 atk and +5 hit. If you want to use Luna, go for it. As long as you can double, it won't make a difference. However unforged Arcfire is pretty cheap so you could ditch Armsthrift instead if you want to.

Scramble maps = lots of event tiles = the fastest way to get a lot of nice stuff. Even if you can Streetpass yourself, that only works once per day which is really slow if you're farming, say, Wilderwind, Aversa's or Rift Doors.

Breaking a weapon on the Throne/a fort and grinding for exp to redo my skillset mid-battle. It sounds silly, but there are situations such as when ultra-lowmanning when it's extremely helpful. Thanks to exp decay, it won't work on Lunatic(+) though.

For Risen, it really depends on who you're fighting. But if you have a full team, it shouldn't matter. If you're doing Apo now, Agg is definitely the better choice. In fact, since Avatar-M has no Galeforce and will almost always be at the back of a pairup, you could also swap Luna for All+2 or Anathema or something if you really wanted to. Say your DK has neutral 0/0 Str/Mag mods (which likely isn't the case, but eh). With LB, that's 48 Str and 51 Mag. Valflame has 23 effective mt after WRB and it's Mag+5, and Ignis gives +24 and Agg gives +10. That's a total of 108 atk with Agg, so you OHKO anything with 28 Res or less. There aren't any promoted classes that weak, but if you have at least +2 Mag mod then you can OHKO enemies with 30 Res, and there are a lot of classes that cap there. Still, Celica's can two-shot anything that doesn't have Aegis(+) or Dragonskin with or without Ignis, and you have AT so it doesn't matter at all.

Sadly, the ones most worth rewatching are the Scramble supports, which don't appear in the support log. Oh well.

If I'm going to go to the minmaxing trouble of capping Chrom's Mag, I may as well have something worthy to use it on, and why have Normal/Cas displayed on your streetpass team when you could have Lunatic+/Cla? I'm probably going to do a Normal/Hard minmax sometime because there's a strategy I want to test on Apo that won't work on Lunatic(+), however.

With LB, your foes will need ~50+ Def/Res for Luna to outdamage Ignis. If you want to get rid of a proc, it would probably be better to lose Luna instead because enemies rarely reach that in one stat and never in both (outside of Apo). If you're still into soloing Risen, Lifetaker will help more but I'd recommend Renewal over either of those since it doesn't involve charging into a crowd to activate.