Czar_Yoshi

Oh, I basically forgot about Chrom and Robin and had the Pegs hard lead from Cht.8 onwards (as soon as they could manage on their own). It was the only way both of them were making it to 20/15 in time for quadruple GF passdowns. That did mean Robin was stuck as a 20/10 Merc for a really long time, though he was still good enough to come back in and MVP for Cynthia's paralogue where he very quickly caught up to everyone else.

Assassin is kind of a funny case. Basically, the meta is currently geared toward getting as much offensive presence as possible (procstacks, high Atk, high Mov, avoiding low Skl + Luna) while not sacrificing or wasting any Spd. So the end goal of most strategies is to take slow, strong classes and give them exactly what they need (and no more) to be strong and not slow. Assassins are so fast that you really don't have to give them anything to hit the highest Spd threshold out there- all it takes is 4 Spd from a combination of mods, All+2 and pairup class bonuses (compare to Wyvern's 12 and Sniper's 10). This would make it seem like you'd just have more leeway to stack offense onto them, but additional offense from sources other than class choice is limited enough that the slow, strong classes are optimized enough to have it all already. So basically they have too much of something you can only have enough of, and not enough of something you always want more of. That said, if you don't feel like spending hours making a fully optimized team, throwing in a few Assassins is a quick and dirty fix to make sure you'll be able to tackle the bosses- not at max power, but still enough to win (yes, I know that implies that getting the slow, strong classes to max power isn't necessary, but it's still what we aim for because there really isn't a better target. At this point it's optimization for the sake of optimization, and it's been there since the old GDL meta). Two good things you can do to fix this are to keep Vulneraries on everyone (and not be afraid to use them), and not send all your units forward at once so you can withdraw your hurt units and heal them up while another wave fights. Also take time in between enemy waves to heal everyone to full- on lower difficulties most enemies will leave you alone unless you specifically get in their range. If you switch the bottom screen to Full view, there are 7 relevant stats (you can't see them when it's Simplified, which is a big source of problems for people new to FE). The base idea behind the calculations is pretty simple once you know what does what. -Strength and Magic are your attack stats. Your attack will be the might of whatever weapon you're using + the corresponding Str/Mag stat, and you also get small bonuses from some pairups, from having a high weapon rank, or having a weapon triangle advantage (Swords beat Axes, Axes beat Lances, Lances beat Swords). -Skill mainly affects your hit rate. Later on, you can get skills like Sol and Luna, and it makes those activate more often too. -Speed affects your Avoid. Your Hit - the enemy's Avoid = your chance to hit. Speed also allows a unit to go twice if it's at least 5 points higher than the enemy's. Some people consider it to be the best stat in the game. -Luck reduces enemy critical chance, and slightly affects your Hit and Avoid. The base formula for Hit is (Skl * 3 + Lck) / 2, and the base formula for Avoid is the same but with Spd instead of Skl. Hit also has your weapon's Hit added to it, and there are a few other ways to raise Hit/Avo such as pairing up, having certain skills and standing on defensive terrain. -Defense and Resistance lower the damage you take from Str/Mag based attacks, respectively. Damage taken = total Atk - appropriate defensive stat. If you want an easy way to level up your healers, try getting an enemy caught out alone, box him in on all four sides with tanky units (like Fred, Avatar and Kellam), unequip their weapons from the items menu (a really great command that prevents them from counterattacking if they get attacked) so they don't kill the foe, and then let him whack you for a while and just sit there healing over and over until his weapon breaks (he'll be harmless then so you can feed him to whoever needs an easy kill).

I'm using dual Pegs on my current Lunatic+ run and averaging about 1 death per chapter (most of which are caused by reinforcements since I'm not looking at the enemy data), and the extra offensive power afforded by having a large team is definitely a thing (so much so that I saved Marth in Cht.6 on my first try, and was able to take Severa's Paralogue before Cht.14). I wouldn't want to try large-team Resetless single-segment, though, because having so many units makes stat growth and level progression extremely random and would require a large amount of strategy to be done on the fly, which takes a looong time.

No Hit+20 on Yarne is a shame, but eh. Lucky 7 doesn't work well in Apo, I'd advise something else (even AT or DG+ if you can't find anything useful, they make nice filler). If Kjelle goes Astra over All+2, put her in a slower, stronger or higher Mov class instead, since she'll have 5 Spd to burn. In that case, you probably won't even be able to tell the difference between pairs performance-wise, so you can go with absolutely anything you want. A few general pointers for improving your game, though: -Always check enemy ranges with X to make sure you're not leaving any hurt/squishy units in range of attacks. The safest way to engage an enemy is to put the unit who will be fighting them at the very edge of their range, and then have a few more units adjacent to them but out of range. -If you feel like your units are too weak, try using fewer. Since the exp is spread more thickly, your units will get stronger faster and be harder to kill. -Make sure everyone is Paired Up at all times. The majority of the units you get early on give +Def boosts, which makes the lead units a lot harder to kill. -Switch the bottom screen to Detailed (there's a switch in the top right corner). It won't help much now, but once it can, it'll be important. -Use your Avatar a lot, they're one of the best units in the game due to growing way faster than everyone else. -Use Fred sparingly to preserve his Silver Lance. If you want to keep him long-term, buy him a sword or give him Stahl's so he can fight without it (I'm assuming it broke before you got to Marth). -Buy lots of Javelins as soon as you can. They're really good and you get a lot of lance users. Give her Gaius. Noire takes not having GF far better than Kjelle does since she has things to gain that neither Gaius nor Donnel can give her, while Kjelle already has everything but GF and more mods (so Gaius makes her perfect). The four you may want to consider for Noire are Vaike, Ricken, Lon'qu and Fred. Vaike gives her AT and excellent mods to be a Double Bow Sniper (use LB/AT/Vengeance/All+2/Anathema and pair her with a Berserker- she can take one without a +Hit skill of its own), Ricken gives her TF and the means to make use of Tharja's big Mag mod (Hard support Sage), Lon'qu gives her the Spd to be a procstacking 75 Spd Wyvern (something that neither Severa nor Kjelle can do without sacrificing GF themselves or getting a Robin father- use LB/LF/Luna/Astra/All+2 and a Berserker support), and Fred gives nice Skl/Str while being in very low demand. Sibling Lucina/Cynthia, Lon'qu/Virion!Severa, and Gaius!Kjelle.

If male ever comes, it won't be until after female is significantly down in time, because male is likely to be a lot longer due to not having GF and thus needing more safety strats.

It depends how good you are. Two combat pairs is usually the best way to go, but if you know in advance where you can train who, who needs to be what level by where, etc it's possible to get all the way to the deployment cap while staying ahead of the curve. That's on Lunatic+. On vanilla Lunatic it's fairly similar, though more lenient in how you can build your team while still fielding a lot of units. The biggest obstacle highmanning tends to face on either mode is Grima, since no amount of fancy footwork and tactics can get past so much raw defensive stats and a time limit. I'd still stick to two or three pairs here unless you know what you're doing.

Fun fact: GKs have such bad Skl that even with WTA's +15 Hit, they're less accurate than Heroes, Snipers, Assassins, Tricksters and Falcon Knights. GK's weapon triangle control isn't an advantage, it's a consolation prize- and it won't even do anything against Bows/Tomes or when engaging multiple types of weapons on enemy phase. Just sayin'.

1. 75 Spd doubles Anna, 69 Spd doubles Thronie, 66 Spd avoids being doubled by Anna. You shouldn't go any lower than this with all resources on the table; once you start doing challenge runs then the big threshold becomes 60 (avoids being doubled by Thronie and can double pretty much all mooks). That's more or less the formula, but there's an easier way to do it: Since LB/Rally/Tonic/Pairup can be assumed for everyone and equals +25, you can just skip that and say the thresholds are 50, 44, and 41. Those need to be met using class bases, mods, All+2, and the class bonuses (+2) from pairup, which is a lot less to juggle in your head. 2. More or less. Support males really want at least one +Hit skill though, and All+2 should only be used on leads when there's either no procstack available, or it breaks a Spd threshold. 3. Two double Galepairs, four single Galepairs and Nah x a Galeboy is generally the way things are done if you want to deploy a full team. The two variants on that are to use a non-GF Noire as well and bench Donnel (take away a double galepair and set Noire up like Nah), and to deploy only a small handful of children (usually concentrating power around Chrom and Robin's families, possibly adding Owain and Severa into the mix somewhere) to make room for more staffbots. 4. Wyvern Lord is for Lon'qu/Virion!Severa, Gaius!Kjelle, and 5+ Spd Morgan-F. It's most useful to group classes according to their base Spd and Spd pairup: Hero/BK/Berserker/Dark Flier give +3 (5), Paladin/Valkyrie/Bride/GM give +2 (4), Dread Fighter gives +1 (3), most others give +0. Base-wise, Wyverns are lowest at 38, then Paladin/Sniper/GM/DK at 40, then BK/Dread Fighter at 41, then Hero/Bride/Sage/Dark Flier at 42, then Valkyrie at 43, then Falco/GL(F) at 44. There are a few other classes that can sometimes be useful, but those are the common ones. Very few classes are legitimately useless- Trickster, Swordmaster, Griffon Rider, Sorcerer and Great Knight tend to be the least common but all technically can do things other classes can't. And who knows, one of them could suddenly get more useful some day- BK is a class that used to be down there with the bottom tier due to its very low base stat total and lack of any standout stats, but its strengths have since become more valuable and it's now situationally very good (Gaius!Noire and Robin-F frequently use it, for example). 5. Not really. It sort of depends on whether your definition of minimum-turning Apo involves clearing it in 1 or 6 turns, though. Sorry, forgot this. For me it depends whether I'm playing Lunatic(+) or not- if I am, I go for GF on Sumia/Olivia because there's usually enough exp to get it in time, if not then I go for it on Lucina or not at all.

A lot of what you've got is good, but for the wrong reasons (aka right pairs, wrong sets). +Mag/-Def Sumia!Lucina!Morgan is really good, but you'll want to run her as a Valkyrie instead of a Dark Flier. The 1 Spd she gains from it makes the difference between being able to double Anna with a Sage support and not being able to. With Lon'qu!Brady's specific mods, he'd really like a supporting Bride or Valkyrie (Morgan, Nah or Noire, most likely). Panne's whoever should definitely be Stahl, he offers good mods and Hit+20 to Yarne, which is about all he can ask for. This Yarne fits well with Chrom!Cynthia, various Severas and Gaius!Kjelle. Gregor!Laurent doesn't want Vantage since he shouldn't be coming up front. What he can do, though, is alternate between being a powerful magical hard support and physical hard support (Gregor gives him decent Str, and he has native Berserker/Hex/Anathema). I'd advise putting him with someone who can lead both physically and magically, such as Chrom!Cynthia or Virion!Severa. Nah should get whomever of Vaike and Henry Gerome doesn't get. Henry makes a slightly better Gerome, but Henry!Nah also fits your needs a little better (she can run Valkyrie to support Brady). Virion!Severa is easily top-tier, but Dark Flier is her secondary set: she primarily runs Wyvern Lord with a Berserker support and LB/GF/LF/All+2/Vengeance for top-of-the-line damage output while retaining flight and hitting the highest Spd threshold in the game. I would strongly recommend giving her either Laurent or Henry!Gerome. Inigo will fare better with Frederick than Kellam as he values Paladin more than Sage. As for Donnel and Kjelle, here's what's on the table: with Gaius, Kjelle is able to run really good Wyvern/Paladin sets, assuming she gets one of the support Berserkers. She hits 75 Spd, has 8 Mov, and will be dishing out a ton of damage whether through high base Str or a procstack (with Wyvern, she runs All+2 over Astra). Noire's benefit from Gaius will largely be seen in her Bow Knight and Dark Knight: the former, with a Berserker support, has plenty of room to run a Luna/Astra procstack and is her default class choice, while the latter with a Sage support is extremely well suited for clearing out Thronie. As for who is hurt by Donnel more (aside from GF, he's a terrible father), Kjelle will be more or less forced to shoot for 69 Spd instead of 75 and generally sticking to Hero (her options would be better if she could win a support Berserker, but Noire, Cynthia and Severa will all have dibs). Noire, on the other hand, will be a very slow Sniper with a Donnel father, and may want to consider dropping Galeforce and taking Ricken, Lon'qu, Vaike or Fred instead and pairing up with a Galeboy. Finally, don't think you're going to get away with all/most/any of these in Lunatic+ nogrind ingame. Except Gregor!Laurent and Chrom x Sumia. Listen to Vascela, he knows what he's talking about. I try to avoid recommending VV because unless someone knows why they want it in the first place, odds are they're not going to know how to use it and will get impaled by the RNG as a result. What difficulty are you playing on? I'm assuming Hard/Cla, but anything less than Lunatic and you can get away with whatever pairs you want. Getting GF on Lucina without using Sumia takes a bit of conscious effort, since you'll either need to avoid letting Chrom see any supports with non-married females until Cht.11 (to get Olivia) or grind up support with Maribelle, which is kind of irritating. Olivia will pay off better for your efforts, though, so I recommend going for her. Since you don't say you want Brady, just bench Maribelle as soon as possible and make sure Sully and Sumia are married prior to Cht.11 and you should be just fine. That'll get you Inigo, as well. In Owain's case, I find it convenient to use Fred as the father, since he can pass Discipline (very useful for getting going), is easy to get damage on to heal for support early on, and later on can help Lissa take hits (if your Lissa gets strong enough, enemies will even start ignoring her to attack your proper combat units, which is really fun). If you just want to get Severa on the field as easily as possible, Libra and Cordelia build support very quickly. However, I'm fond of using Vaike, as Cordelia usually turns out with very high Str and Vaike can make that even higher. Vaike can also pass Severa Sol, which lets her go to another base class instead of promoting immediately after you get her, which makes her turn out better in the long run.

Very little can outright OHKO you in Lunatic(+) because of comparatively high base HPs. Even a Luna+ Fighter in the Prologue can't OHKO -Def base Robin holding Thunder. Avoiding getting 2HKOed is quite a challenge, though- Def just doesn't make that much of a difference very early on.

It should, yeah, but unless two DSes are needed to kill the target...

There's your problem: Lunatic gives a lot of exp, but not enough to keep a full party ahead of the curve. You should focus entirely on training one or two units (who aren't named Frederick) and leave the rest on the bench, or the game will become extremely difficult around Cht.12. You probably will need it if you want to keep going from here. Most of the turn-by-turns that are made to get people out of jams are for the first four chapters (Pro-3) and are intended to leave you with a team that can manage itself, so if you're stuck now there's not many other resources at your disposal. The one thing you can try if you don't want to shell out is Spotpass, though. Sell the Bullion(L) from Renown and buy yourself a good tank- normally you'd power up by buying weapons from them, but if you don't have any units god enough to put those weapons to good use then those won't help much.

Stahl with Panne, Gregor with Cherche.

Fair enough.

If you're using +Spd, you should be able to double everything by a very wide margin anyway. I tend to save mine for whenever they'll break a threshold on another unit I'm training (usually Sumia in Cht.5), and if I haven't put them to use by the time I'm getting the kids, they go to whoever won't be doing a second base class. That's good. Normal/Hard/Lunatic do very little to prepare you for Lunatic+ (they even go as far as to drill strategies into you that will actively get you killed/put you at the mercy of the RNG there), so playing Lunatic+ and having enough patience to not try to brute-force your way through is the best way to get good at it. A big part of the difficulty, however (both Lunatic and Lunatic+) is that they're very unforgiving of long-term planning mistakes. As much as I know about them, I've still had situations where I've managed to get a large team significantly ahead of the difficulty curve and can stomp any zerg rush through pure offensive pressure... But don't have any cash to buy Javelins and Winds with and am stuck using up valuable Legendaries that I'll need for the last few chapters. If you periodically restart the game while going through Lunatic+ (and just rely on Kuroi/Int strats to get through the first four chapters), you'll notice an even bigger improvement in your ability to be prepared for things and adequately respond to them. Just be patient with the difficulty and remember that 90% of the RNG occurs before you select your units, positions and inventories. ...And also keep the enemy data on hand so you don't get wrecked by reinforcements. No amount of tactics can protect you from an unforseen ambush when any given enemy can ORKO one of your units when engaging on their terms.

You've got it backwards. Not running Vantage isn't going to leave you in the hands of the RNG- your own moves are. If you leave a unit somewhere where they have a chance to be killed by the RNG, it was preventable. Vantage itself does nothing except change the move order in battle. Thus, running Vantage will give you no difference in the outcome of the battle unless you kill the foe before they can attack you. Without either 100% DS or very careful planning, this will likely be a random event. Thus, using Vantage without proper care will either do nothing, or give you a chance to be killed (and in the event it does nothing- aka both you and the foe survive battle- it will have caused you to attack before taking additional damage, which lowers your Vengeance output and makes you weaker). Vantage is not a filler skill. It's not something you tack on "just because", and it's not something you should use just because AC and some other people blew the community's mind with it a long time back when everyone was bad at the game. It's something you should only use after you have a good answer to the question "what situation am I bringing Vantage for in which it will perform better than a standard GF/Faire/Proc(stack) set?" If you desire Vengeance to be even stronger (aka safely attacking at HP too low to survive a hit) for all four hits, then let the enemy move first on EP, have their hit knock you down to 1 HP, and then go ham (if they miss/get DGed, that's fine then because you're still not dead). Otherwise, attack on player phase: unless they have Vantage+, you still get 6 hits before they get to attack, same as if you were using Vantage. As for the slot Astra is using, it would be better spent on Agg. While the average damage increase from a single proc to a procstack can be comparable to Agg, procs don't occur in the back which is where Owain will be spending at least half of his time (2/3rds, if he's not married to Nah). Challenge runs notwithstanding, Owain should always be running LB/GF/Agg/Faire/proc. Brady has a full skillset from Maribelle, though, and only cares about mods. Ricken delivers (for Mag, at least) and is one of Brady's better fathers. Donnel gives Severa Troubadour, Valkyrie and War Cleric.

Something's fishy, where are you getting those numbers from? And did you remember True Hit?

Probably. Him or Libra.

Using it up is a real danger if you try to get more out of the Prologue (Lv.7 or 8, depending on Mag growth) and try to do Cht.1 without relying on dodges.

That's probably a good thing, because if you were in a scenario where it would have activated you likely would have died. What's K.Marth's second skill?

Too late, you just gave it anyway.

Lissa always does that, it's the way of Lunatic(+). If you bother to pick up Owain, he'll appreciate it as a passdown. If you need a stomper, Travant and Ashnard are extremely good at it and I recommend them (they're mostly identical except Ashnard comes with higher Res, while Travant comes with A Lances).

Typically you wouldn't want to keep Owain in the Myrmidon line, since SMs are really bad and Assassins are redundant with the metagame (they easily give you the thresholds normally obtained through careful pairs and calculations, but don't have any of the perks other classes can bring to the table such as high Mov/Str). Stahl probably still is the best father for the job, though. But keep in mind his real strength as a father for Owain is in end class diversity; if you absolutely know you'll be sticking to SM/Assassin then Fred could be superior (he offers +1 Skl, but shouldn't change Owain's Spd thresholds and has a lot more availability).

I mostly use mine as a repository of useful info since the majority of my time is spent doing Awakening gameplay-related stuff. Outside of that, just quick plugs for stuff I like (right now, The Stromlight Archive and Yooka-Laylee).

Gerome will fare the best of the three, as he gets his Berserker and Hit+20 too. His Str/Skl mods, at +5/4, are more or less Yarne tier too, so he's happy. On Morgan's end, Cherche doesn't give any special skills so it's all about mods. While the +5/4 Str/Skl are nice for her as well, unlike Gerome she cares about Spd and will fare poorly with that +0. Cherche herself isn't cut out to lead Robin in Apo- she's got no proc, no GF, no Faire and negative Spd. She'll be OK in non-Apo postgame once you have her decked out with LB and the like, but everyone is at least OK there. Regarding ingame performance, Cherche has fairly good bases and can be worth the investment on Hard or vanilla Lunatic, but has trouble on Lunatic+. She comes late, though, so Moran and Gerome likely won't arrive on time to do anything useful.