Czar_Yoshi

PSA to everyone: this isn't Gfaqs. Don't pretend like it is. Not so. Nowi is at the top of the top, while Panne, Sumia and Cordelia are also extremely good, while Lissa can draw from a free pool of exp starting instantly and in some situations can get up with Robin and Nowi in power. Stahl and Miriel are both good early-mid term investments as well, and that's not even getting into the kids (Lucina, Morgan and Laurent always rule, Severa, Yarne and Nah have decent chances of being good as well). Things are more rigid in Lunatic+, but there's still a decently sized host of units who are legitimately good and worth training up. Kellam's usefulness: he serves well on higher difficulties as a non-Fred +Def pairup (either for Fred when he's away from Robin, or Robin when he/she's away from Fred), but is rarely worth investing in. As a parent, he really in legitimately bad, having no children for whom he's the best in a minmax setting and very few (namely Inigo) for whom he can even be B tier. His -2 Spd is simply too much of a curse, and Tomefaire/Luna can't make up for it when Ricken exists. Were he to have a better third class than Thief and not be a net negative to all girls who wish to lead, he might be able to do something, but Kellam is simply fundamentally useless as a parent in the current meta.

I imagine it's a little more complicated than that, but that's the general idea, yes.

Then you still have Sumia and Cordelia. Those two, paired with Chrom and Robin and with a few staffbots and Olivia to provide support, can still take Apo no sweat. There's that +Hit again. Top-tier Yarne is still top tier. She's slow, but not moreso than Donnel!Kjelle. The sacrifice doesn't do wonders for her Str, either (she's stuck with just +1). Class-wise, she can scrape together 75 Spd as a Falco with no All+2 and a Paladin support, or can settle for 69 with Wyvern Lord and the same set. Paladin with All+2 will hit 69 as well with a +0 support, if Cynthia needs to take one of those. Gaius!Cynthia would be really good if not for Kjelle wanting him more. She has a +6 Spd mod, making her the only non-Morgan unit in the game to have both GF, TF and enough Spd to reach 75 as a DF with All+2 and a +0 support. Unfortunately she's brought back to earth by her 5-skillslot syndrome, because to properly take advantage of that she needs to run her Luna/Astra procstack, and ends up wanting LB/GF/TF/Luna/Astra/All+2, which doesn't fit. Can't take off All+2, it's the whole point of the set. Can't take off Astra, since it gives much more average damage than TF- but if you take off TF, then she ceases to be special: suddenly any old +6 Spd DF will do. But Lon'qu!Severa is the main one that comes to mind, and since she uses Vengeance instead of Luna/Astra, she's suddenly got room for TF and nothing to put there. This is actually one of the places where you might consider dropping GF, if having all that at once is that noteworthy. Though then you run into Lon'qu!Noire, who does the same thing (Wyvern Lord with LB/All+2/Luna/Astra/Lancefaire). Sigh. DSt+ is one of the best skills in the game, far better than LB. Never remove it unless you're doing a challenge that specifically bars DSes, replace BF instead.

Technically, it's not coded for them to stack. It would take a lot more work to check each of a character's five skillslots and apply the skill effect that many times than it does to merely check if the skill is present at all and turn its effect on. Well, there are some dudes with 99 HP, and I don't think there's an HP mod, so something's up there (it's probably not a boolean flag that sets HP to 99, either, because Hard Grima has 88 HP).

People also like Fred!Gerome, but that doesn't stop it from being a bottom-of-the-barrel pair. Vaike gives Owain some of the worst mod clash in the game with only Hero to show for it. Ricken gives Yarne his +Hit skill, don't do that. Since Yarne is otherwise set and will have good mods no matter what you do, it might be best to use him to pawn off a really important dad that most everyone wants. Fred!Gerome and Stahl!Kjelle are musts, of course (Kellam!Kjelle might be worse, but he can hurt others more). Donnel!Severa will be really bad, with Peg/Merc overlap and only a +2 Spd mod. Brady is another Vaike candidate, though Kellam could work too. Definitely put Gregor on Inigo, they've got total class overlap. Henry would work out on Noire, due to DM overlap, no extra Spd and no Tomefaire. For Morgan, use +Lck/-Spd and Tiki.

Good luck with BSFE.

Open the 3ds browser and go to 'http://dukesrg.no-ip.org/3ds/go', and it'll run the Launcher.dat on your SD card (menu version 9.2 or less only).

You can put them on, but it won't do what you're hoping.

That's because it doesn't matter, he has access to everything. Vantage/Sol is pretty bad, by the way. It leaves your fate in the hands of the RNG, which is something you should never do if you can avoid it.

For non-DLC utility in general, try using: -A mobility skill (Deliverer/Galeforce/Pass) -A defensive skill (PavGis/Breaker) -A self-healing skill (Sol/Lifetaker/Renewal) -A support skill/Aura (Solidarity/Anathema/Charm/Rally) or a second mobility/defensive skill -A money skill (AT/Despoil)

Well, I was mainly referring to Inigo and Morgan isn't the best to leave behind (though taking only who you need is a very nice strategy).

It looks good, except for one thing: you don't have five staffbots. With Olivia, you've only got room for three. You also might have too many double Galepairs. KOes are very hard to come by reliably here, especially for pairs that would run a risk of missing them in NHB (like a Berserker leading a Sniper). It'll probably serve you better to leave GF off some of the Galeboys and use the skillslot to make them better hard supports (if possible).

You'll get another Heal from the Knight on the bottom right of Cht.3. Use Lissa as much as you can before that, though having at least ten uses going into Cht.3 is helpful. If you're opportunistic, there should be plenty of chances to feed her later once Heal becomes buyable. Lissa does do very well when fed on Lunatic(+) so I consider it a worthy investment.

Not much better or worse than her other options. Lucina's skillset never changes no matter what class she's running. She'll be slow, though. Sage or DF would be significantly faster.

Starting Decrypt9: once you have a compiled version of Decrypt9 (find it on that site everyone knows about but can't say by name), put its Launcher.dat on the root of your 3ds's SD card along with your nccinfo.bin (yes, it should be about 1k). Then put the SD card back in the 3ds, run the browser exploit, and follow the instructions on the 3ds screen (aka press A). Does this give you all the xorpads?

They don't really ruin anything, Chrom's got +0/1 Mag/Spd. But they sure won't let Brady take advantage of being the only fast Galeboy.

Just a warning, the amount of grinding you can do that will actually help on Lunatic but not break it completely is surprisingly precise.

How close your Spd/Mag are doesn't actually change how useful each of them will be, though. For a Valkyrie, any Spd mod between +4 and -1 is going to leave you doubling/not doubling exactly the same set of Apo enemies. But since you're not planning to fight anything... Then definitely just take +Mag. Spd shouldn't ever matter on a Staffbot (it could matter on Morgan, though).

Very well. Allow me to demonstrate. Let's take a hypothetical lead with 80 Skl and 90 Atk, vs an enemy with 50 Def (these numbers are reasonable approximations of what one could expect from Apo, not actually based on anything). The lead has Luna and Astra, and the enemy has Dragonskin but no Shield. Base attack damage is going to be 20. Luna damage is going to be 32, and Astra damage is going to be 50. Astra has a 40% proc rate, Luna alone has an 80% proc rate, and together Luna has a 48% proc rate. Average damage per hit without Astra: 32 * .8 + 20 * .2 =29.6 With Astra and Luna together: 37.76 Adding Astra in addition to Luna not only increases your average damage by more than 8 points per hit (through Dragonskin), but it reduces your odds of getting a whiff by 40%. Running just Astra by itself will actually yield a higher average damage output than just Luna (32, with these numbers), but it also increases the whiff rate over Luna by 200%, which is very undesirable and yields a 12.69% chance of failing to proc a single Astra over four hits of a Brave weapon. I tend to prefer Ignis when available as it's pretty rare to have less than 55 alt. Atk after LB, Rally and Pairup, which puts it at more damage than against all but the tankiest of bosses at worst (and you can easily get an extra pile of alt. Atk by running Dark Flier or Dark Knight or something). There are people who would argue that this makes Luna better since it does better when you actually need the power, though. Actually, Aether and Astra are pretty close. See, Astra is a hard 2.5x multiplier on damage dealt, kind of like a lesser critical. Aether is a 2x multiplier, with one of those hits having a Luna effect. So which is stronger comes down to whether the boost from Luna (only the difference between it and a normal hit, not the whole attack) is better than half the damage you'd be doing initially. Luna's boost is Def / 2. Astra's boost is (Atk - Def) / 2. A bit of algebra later, and Astra will have superior damage output in the case that your Atk is more than twice the enemy's Def, and otherwise Aether will be superior. This is fairly close in Apo, actually, but it also tends to not matter because once you have that much of an attack advantage, the enemies are toast with or without procs because their HP is relatively much worse than their defense (due to Braves' ridiculous damage multipliers). Bottom line, Aether and Astra are pretty much equal in power, though Aether also has a (very small) HP boost which is hard to quantify in utility. I prefer using a male Robin, because having two units who are very good at their jobs seems more valuable than one unit who's good at their job and another who's merely OK. To elaborate, female Robin is nothing special. Sure, she's got all the skills, but that doesn't actually matter when she's facing a big pool of 2nd gen girls who have it all too: pretty much everyone but Nah, and that includes Morgan-F. She can't rely on her mods to make her stick out either, as no matter what she does she'll be outstripped by sibling Lucina/Cynthia, Gaius!Kjelle and Virion/Lon'qu!Severa. Her best hope for Spd is +4, which is 1 short of the threshold needed to make Wyvern and Paladin amazing. Whatever she does, she'll have an even Spd mod (for some reason, all the useful thresholds happen to happen for odd modifiers), and she can't get both positive Spd and positive Str at the same time. At best, she'll be another Gaius!Noire. Morgan himself will just be another galeboy- none of them ever run anything but LB/GF/Agg/Faire/Proc, and the only unique things he can have are Ignis (of questionable utility) and a high Str mod. On the other hand, male Robin has no pretenses of needing to lead. He's a hard support, and he's very good at it, bringing to the table a +4 Atk mod and the ability to have both Str and Skl. For him, having all the support classes and skills actually means something, since there are all those really good 2nd gen girls who are in need of supports and can give Morgan whatever she needs for mods without worrying about Asset/Flaw (though it still often comes into play). Non-Yarne fathers for Morgan-M tend to come with no more than one offensive stat above three. Most mothers for Morgan-F come with more than one above five. +Str Lon'qu!Severa!Morgan will have +6/8/6 Str/Skl/Spd mods, while +Mag Sumia!Lucina!Morgan will have +5/4/7 Mag/Skl/Spd mods. I've dropped Galeforce from units who already have it before, and one more double Galepair isn't going to be enough to convince me to drop those mods, skills and synergy.

I don't find it useful to categorize things as "grinding" because that title isn't very descriptive. Things like DLC, Risen, Logbook, Spotpass, Streetpass and Renown quantities are much more precise.

Fred has -2 Spd on Stahl, but the only place that will ever make a difference is as a Hero with a +0 Spd pairup. Class-wise, all Stahl gives over Fred is Sniper, while all Fred gives over Stahl are General and Wyvern- both of which he's going to struggle to reach even 69 Spd in (note: this is one of the only times I've seen where you might actually consider Griffon, as it finds its niche as the fastest male flying class and allows him to hit 69 with any +Spd support). Either way, Inigo is mainly going to be looking at Paladin/Hero, though with Stahl Sniper, BK and Warrior are all tempting.

Spd+2 is something I'd want to use to hit 60 on a challenge run, not 75 in NHB. While 75 is very convenient, it's not quite worth that. Not better, exactly the same. ...Well, technically it's better because it's easier to make. But that doesn't have to do with performance. Every pairing in your file shows up on your Streetpass card, so there's no need to prioritize some over others. Luna does have the higher activation rate, yes... But what you care about isn't activating a skill, it's not not activating a skill. If that doesn't make sense, think about it this way: Say you've got a unit with 80 Skl (a reasonable upper target for a lead). If you give them just Luna, they'll have an 80% chance of using Luna, and a 20% chance of doing nothing. But if you add Astra on top of that, you've got a 40% chance of using Astra and a 48% chance of using Luna- and only a 12% chance of using nothing. Just like that, you've nearly halved your odds of doing nothing (if you could run both Luna and Ignis instead, you'd only have a 4% chance of doing nothing!). Luna does a lot of damage, Astra does a huge amount of damage, but nothing isn't very impressive so your primary focus should be on avoiding doing nothing. If you want more, I can do some damage calcs and show the average damage increase between Luna/Astra and just Luna (hint: it's higher than you think it is). The presence of PavGis doesn't actually change which or Luna or Astra will do better, by the way. Since they halve damage, think of them instead as doubling the enemy's HP and having no effect on damage dealt. In Int's Cht.3 strat, Robin only needs to be tanky enough to take a single shot from a Luna+ Archer, which is asking pretty much nothing unless you're catastrophically HP screwed (for taking a single hit, high HP is much more useful than high Def). Cht.2 has no defense thresholds, and while having 11 in Cht.1 can make things easier with certain strats, it doesn't come into play with the more reliable one. In the Prologue, everything 2HKOes you regardless of your asset/flaw so it doesn't matter there. What's much more useful is Rescue and GF. Since so many Streetpass teams pack Lethality, the only way to get past them without risking death (it'll be a low chance, but still nonzero) is to never be in a situation where they get to attack, and for that you need the ability to run away. Pairup, Rally and DLC skills certainly even the field by making it easier to get kills, but at the end of the day what matters is never, ever being forced to allow the enemy to swing their weapon at you. And yes, that means that since you're never taking damage, healing is useless. If you want an AT Owain for ingame/Apo, +Spd/-Def Robin is the best option (even taking into account Lissa's effect on Robin and Morgan). Donnel and Gregor both just can't give Owain anything else he wants. I did use him once (ingame), and he was OK. Sol/AT was nice, as was being able to keep his starting weapon rank. He'll not get you killed on Hard/Cla or anything, but he's far from Apo tier.

Having Morgan or other children who are arguably more dangerous than Logbook Avatars sharing space with them on a Streetpass team isn't actually as helpful as it sounds, because the player fighting them will prioritize and pick off the most dangerous units first. It's not like you've got anything to lose from using them, but since the units with the best odds of actually doing something are the weakest ones you bring, you don't have much to gain from it either. Lunatic+ is very possible- there are turn-by-turn guides for Cht.0-2 and somewhat 3 that are pretty much both Asset/Flaw independent and enemy skill independent, so at the very least you can make it to Spotpass and DLC with anything and fairly little hassle. They're in Kuroi's Lunatic+ Resetless topic (usually near the top of the first page) and Interceptor's Cht.2 topic (in his sig), if you want them. Kuroi also streams Lunatic+ on Fridays at 7 pm pst if you want to see the strats in action. Personally, I think that if you're going to the trouble of creating a Streetpass card for show, you should prioritize ships when they exist. Filling the support log is nice, but it's a job for Normal and Hard, not Lunatic(+).

If you're fighting Streetpass, you'll need to be prepared to deal with Lethality spam, 1-range Counter and lots of DLC (Res+10 makes you do nothing, Agg gets you killed, LB makes both of those worse and gets you doubled too). That Nah has no way of dealing with any of that without plenty of team support. Luna and PavGis don't do anything in the back, which is where Gerome will stay because he's a hard support (Agg+Braves has twice the effect in the back, so since he doesn't have Galeforce he'll never want to lead). DG+ isn't very useful because you'll want to bring a lot of staff support into Apo and that'll do a much better job of keeping you alive, and +2 Str pales in comparison to a Faire, of which Fred!Gerome has none. Virion!Gerome would be preferrable; he can use Warrior with Bowfaire/Hit+20 to great effect (he'll have the same damage output as Fred!Gerome@General's Brave Axes, but with about 40 more Hit (assuming you use Prescience as well), no Weapon Triangle worries and +2 more Str for his pairup boost). As for the others... Overall, your team will get through. Remember to use tonics on everyone before going in (especially Spd/Atk), forge your Braves, and bring all the Rallies spread across two (preferably flying) Rallybots. The only area of concern I see is that you have none of the five top-tier girls (5+ Spd Morgan-F, sibling Lucina/Cynthia, Gaius!Kjelle, and Lon'qu/Virion!Severa), which might give you trouble with some of the bosses. If you have Snipers, you could get somewhere with them, and none of your units will lose encounters to being doubled (Braves don't count, never be attacked by Snipers with Brave Bows), but you'll still need to be careful. The best way to get around this is probably just to bring Chrom and Olivia into the action, with her as a Dark Flier (LB, GF and anything else) and him as a Bow Knight (LB/Agg/BF/DSt+/Hit+20), they can destroy anything and everything, guaranteed. You could also get Gaius onto Kjelle and run her as a Paladin (LB/GF/Faire/Astra/Luna) with a Berserker Virion!Yarne support, which works without All+2 but would give you problems with Noire since she'd either be bad or require a Galeboy support as a result. Obtaining a Virion!Severa would be very easy since Stahl and Virion are interchangeable dads on hard supports, but she requires All+2 to work her magic. You could make Noire a BK. She'll get her 75 Spd without All+2 and her 8 Mov, and Lucina can have the Boots. There are plenty of ways. They hardly matter, though, because with that much power concentrated that close together, those six can beat S.Apo on their own without needing to break from conventional strats: you have 8 attacks per turn there, and Apo enemies always spawn in packs of five so you've got enough power to kill five and have one move remaining on each of your three pairs to retreat with. Two of the pairs have free 100% DS as well, so the risk of dropping a kill is very low. You can make the rest of your pairs to try to keep up (good Severas and Kjelles definitely can), or you can do whatever you want for the sake of aesthetics. If you want to show off on your Streetpass card, though, wouldn't it be better to do so on Lunatic+? And if you're making the team consist entirely of Logbook Avatars, why Chrom!Inigo!Morgan?