Czar_Yoshi

Yeah, sorry. The nice part of grinding for me is that there are many different ways to do it, and they're all completely independent of eachother so I can use some and not use others to suit whatever my tastes happen to be at the moment. DLC, Spotpass, Risen, Routing and Olivia are all 100% ignorable if I so choose, and all of them can be used either to make the game easier or harder.

For what it's worth, in Lunatic the AI is there for enemies to trade with other enemies for healing items. I haven't seen them do it with weapons, though, but that's still pretty advanced. There are unpromoted healers in CoY/LB.

Here's a question: how much do you think any difficulty mode, be it Hard or Lunatic+, affected the games sales? How about the skill system? How about the waifu system? As you said, Awakening sold as much as it has because there are a lot of new players, and players don't adopt a series for no reason. Even if they have money, they tend to go after a familiar series. The main reason Awakening sold as well as it did- and this is kind of a fundamental principle of economics- is because Nintendo marketed it a lot more heavily than any other FE game (that was localized, at least). So marketing makes up one part of the fanbase- new customers- but what about people who bought the game because they played a past entry in the series and enjoyed it (again, this holds true for pretty much every Nintendo series ever)? The more people like a game, the more likely they are to get the next game simply based on a good experience with the series. Now what do you think would give a better impression, a difficulty mode that is unlocked when defeating what seems to be the hardest mode in the game, or none? Even if it only reached 1% of Awakening customers (completely random number), that's still 3,000 people who who had one more experience of hidden replay value. When stacked with all the other features, be they big or small, that number adds up and translates into pretty substantial sales increases in the future (or it has in past examples- FE14 isn't here yet so it remains to be seen if it actually makes a difference, though I've presented a pretty sound argument for why it would be safe for a game company to bet on it happening). tl;dr: Lunatic+ won't scratch FE13's sales either way, but the collective replay value it contributes to will make a big difference in FE14's sales.

Take a look at those. The first one's from PoR, and the second one is from Awakening. There's a pretty big difference in graphical quality, and it's not something that took ten seconds to produce. Respect the Devs, bro.

More like a day to change the code and several weeks to play through it for debugging purposes. It would probably take more than ten seconds just to find the files they needed. A full list of stuff they had to do: Create variants of Pavise, Aegis, Luna, Hit+20 with altered stats, create new images for them, create the code to distribute them (which has to change at Cht.3, work differently for some bosses (Yen'fay only gets one L+ skill, for example), and may not distribute skills equally), redo the boss data for Grima, Walhart, and possibly Yen'fay, add Lunatic+ to the menu (includes making a Lunatic+ graphic and an additional recolor of the Cas/Cla bit), make that new Lunatic+ bit show up on Streetpass cards, add some stuff in to make it unlock instead of default, write the mode description, and finally test the thing. Compared to the other modes that required complete changes of enemy data including forges and skills (don't forget Hit+10), that's not very much, but it's a lot more than you're giving them credit for. Oh, and don't forget actually thinking the mode up. Someone actually had to decide to make another mode and determine how to set it up, that doesn't happen instantly. And given how each skill seems to be geared toward countering a specific "OP" strategy, they probably spent a decent amount of time on that.

On the contrary, I'd love an official localization of FE4 on modern hardware. The need for balancing revolves less around the enemies and more around playable characters. Lunatic+'s big issue is that there are a select few characters/classes who are very good at it, and the majority of the cast stinks for all but utility/decoy purposes.

The main problem with that plan is that it puts a ton of extra uses on the Thunder tome, and you really don't want it breaking before the first wave of Cht.2 is done. If you can get it to last, it's fine, but it's something to consider. It looks like most of the extra exp is coming from the chip damage and not the kills. I wonder, if the Elthunder mage could be beaten in the normal strat without a Lissa pairup (probably from a lucky DS from Fred), would your atk be lowered significantly enough to make a difference in the number of levels gained?

This topic: Kaboom. I bought it because I was mad at IS for Sticker Star and wanted to give them a chance to redeem themselves after I heard Awakening had mustache humor. True story.

afaik the current "official strategy" for Prologue gives all but two Myrmidons to Avatar, so that's a step up (as long as it's consistent). Spill the beans, old chap.

You're not screwed, your exp gain will just tank sooner which means it's more important to get some more units (the children). Veteran combined with the children's low internal levels and high base stats can boost them to Avatar's power around the time they hit Lv.20 promoted (in ~2 chapters) and from there they can take over as your main units with your Avatar functioning as a wall/decoy to help feed them. The reason early Hero is important is that there's a lot of Lances in Valm, and your Avo won't work so well against those (plus, Hit+10 starts showing up around then, making dodgetanking much harder) so you want to have ready axe access. Axes and Lances together really are the best, but all the classes that get both of those have weaknesses. You might want to consider using an Arms Scroll (there's one in Cht.15 if you missed the one in Par.4) to get your Avatar to D Axes so you can use Hand Axes, they're quite cheap and useful.

As a general rule, Geromes that have Berserker are good and ones without aren't. Stahl!Gerome doesn't even have Vengeance. I suppose he could be a Bowfaire Warrior, but Berserkers are just better (+Spd instead of +Def). If you want to make Owain physical, your concern should be his mods instead of his classes, so Avatar needs to be +Str. Of course, you could always do Ricken!Owain, make him a Dark Knight/Dread Fighter and give him a Levin Sword... In general, minmax teams use either seven total pairs (Avatar and 13 children), five of which have one Galeforce unit and two of which have two Galeforce units, or six total pairs (Avatar and one child, or two children get left out), three of which have one Galeforce and three of which have two. Everyone with Galeforce should try to have at least one offensive proc (Ignis, Aether, Luna, or Vengeance), possibly stacking Ignis/Aether and Luna, and everyone without Galeforce should either be dedicated support (stuff to boost Atk and Hit) or VV. All non-VV boys, especially Galeforce ones, should have Aggressor. Obviously these are just general guidelines and don't matter if you know what you're doing.

Internal level: Whenever you reclass (Second Seal) half of your current level (promoted classes count as displayed level+20) is added to your internal level, and your internal level is added to your displayed level (again, +20 for promoted classes) to calculate exp gain. On normal, the IL caps at 20, on Hard it caps at 30 and on Lunatic(+) it caps at 50, which is a huge difference and completely wrecks your exp gain after a few reclasses. In general, it's a good idea in Lunatic to reclass your Avatar into one base class, promote, and then go through one other promoted class before settling on your final class. When people say 20/5 and the like, it usually refers to what level they reclassed at. A 20/5 Grandmaster leveled Tactician to 20 and is either a Lv.5 Grandmaster currently or reclassed to something else at Lv.5.

Lon'qu!Severa!Morgan: 46(base) +10(Mods) +9(Assassin pairup) +4(Barracks) +2(Tonic) =71, which doubles everything but Anna and Nightmare Sniper.

I don't think one week counts as a necrobump... Though I'm not exactly happy to see this topic again.

Brawl is a pretty popular game, but go on any major SSB forum and see just how many people love tripping. Just because there's a forum filled with enthusiasts for one particular game doesn't mean they like every part of it (I can't think of any game that I've considered completely flawless).

Necrobump no.

You can just kill all but the four closest enemies. You're locked to range 2, not weaponless. Switching: I once had the misfortune of having a GK behind me and getting boxed in on a river. I know it's a niche scenario, but switching isn't always possible. There's also a decent possibility that you're soloing LB3, have an untrained Chrom behind you, and switching him out front would get him mauled.

The thing is, Fanfics and game scripts are completely different due to one being text-based and one being an interactive, visual medium. Game stories are composed of dialogue and cutscenes, written works substitute narrated descriptions for cutscenes, and those two don't mesh so well. In this case (replacement stories) the stories are meant to be playable, so they should appear as they would in a game.

You could probably swap Avo+10 with Slow Burn for a bigger boost. Apo is long enough that it should fully charge, and if you need more time it's pretty easy to box a Sniper and stall a few turns.

Say your Sniper has pretty much maxed stats and is only training for Bow exp. You'll probably have enough Avo that nothing will ever hit you, and a 30% DG rate, so it'll probably take about 100 turns for an enemy to break their weapon. That can be skipped through in a few minutes, and you'd lose more time than that if you were trying to build Bow exp with Galeforce, messed up and got trapped, and had to reset. So I'd say it's pretty useful.

Try this: go play Apo (the physically largest map in the game), wait until there are 20+ enemies onscreen, especially if they're at opposite corners of the screen, and start toggling the enemy range on and off (x). It lags quite a bit (on a normal 3ds, at least). If a (comparatively) simple thing such as checking range takes a perceptible amount of time, it stands to reason that AI calculations take a good deal longer. However, FE1 was for the Famicom, and it still managed to run a decent AI without massive EP load times. Why? Because it had all of the time units were moving around and executing battle animations to calculate moves. In Awakening (and Shadow Dragon) the devs added an option to simply skip EP, and that makes calculation times much more noticeable, and thus a greater priority to reduce, hence the simpler AI (though time was probably also a factor). I recall Genealogy even had pauses where the enemy would do nothing for a second, even with battle animations because the maps were so big and the AI was more complex (enemies could hold formations, etc). This is, by the way, also a reason why going back to huge maps isn't that great of an idea, at least until FE goes back on console. The Wii U could handle it, but the 3ds would need the skip EP option removed (or it wouldn't save much time). By the way, Awakening doesn't have microtransactions- microtransactions are where you pay for consumables (if you had to pay each time you played a DLC map) or for something the devs can very easily crank out (spotpass characters) on a per-character basis.

Donnel's best class path is Villager (2) -> Bench, or not recruiting him at all. Even once you finally get him traction as a Villager, reclassing causes you to lose all your weapon ranks and start all over. Seriously, he's not worth it. In the event that you *do* decide to use him, Merc -> Hero -> Warrior will pay off more in the end, but you probably won't get to pass Counter to Kjelle. Lissa should either promote to Sage or reclass to Troubadour (I recommend the former). Maribelle should promote to Valkyrie, possibly gaining a little more exp first. Avatar should either reclass to Merc, or promote and then reclass to Dark Flier at Lv.10. GK will wreck Sully's Spd and make her useless as a combat unit, so don't do that (Paladin is a better option, Aegis can come in handy on Lunatic+ and is much easier to get than Pavise). Fionorde, I'm guessing Grindiness refers to exp-funneling techniques like the Water trick, setting up a choke to weed out Pass enemies and feed them one at a time to someone, or breaking enemy weapons and boxing Archers.

Avatar himself isn't the problem, it's how other characters treat him. The worst instance of this is after Cht.14, when Flavia, Balsilio, and Chrom heap incredible amounts of praise on him for beating the Valmese fleet, even though the group was using Basilio's plan and Avatar did nothing. I happen to like Lunatic+ and consider it fairly well executed. The only two things I'd alter are Cht.2 (add PavGis) and do something about Sorcs (add a skill that causes HP sapping attacks to damage the user and heal the foe). Actually, I kind of even like Cht.2 as-is- some resetting is required, but there's a surprising amount of stuff you can do to increase your odds of winning if you survive turn 1.

Superior Weapons are forgeable, and Dread Fighters can at least use Superior Jolts to have 2 range. And LB gives (10*3+10)/2 = 20 Avo, not 15. That said, Avo stacking is a viable streetpass tactic (well, as much as anything can be viable there), but it doesn't work that well in-game for a variety of reasons (including that it's overkill for anything but Hawkeye long before you max out your skills- Nightmare Sniper can be reduced to 0% hit rate without Bowbreaker/a Superior Bow). If you must do it, it would be better to stack Lucky 7, Quick Burn and one situation-appropriate Breaker so you still have two skillslots open for other important things.

Use Miiverse to post screenshots, not a phone. Way better quality that way. But... Would you want to be responsible for posting something like that?