Czar_Yoshi

But passing down Luna+ would mean no GF passdown... I think I'd go for Pavise+ on Avatar-F for ingame as well. For postgame/Apo I'd put one on either Chrom or Nowi, and it would either be Luna+ or a Shield (that goes for both of them, not respectively).

Typical good assets for Lunatic(+) are Def and Spd. Spd lets you do more if you know what you're doing, Def makes the mode less of a headache if you don't. -Lck and -Skl tend to be the least intrusive flaws, but even if you're good at stacking Dge to negate enemy crits, -Lck will still annoy you earlygame, and come back to haunt you midgame if you want to pick up Armsthrift. Skl tends not to matter at all later, but Thunder's hitrate will be shaky early on so you'll need to avoid situations where you're relying on it hitting to avoid death. Ideally you'll stick with just Avatar until Cht.2, add your second unit late Cht.2 or early Cht.3, and once you're through Cht.6 (focusing on Avatar, but giving stray kills to everyone you'll want to raise later) get all your parents going. The game takes a big dip in difficulty during Cht.7-11 to give you time to build your team and prepare for what's coming.

The most optimal way to go about exp distribution is to try to get Avatar to around Lv.10 before Cht.2 (there's a bit of RNG involved (DSes and Mag growth) in whether this is possible, but a high 9 is very doable), beat the bottom wave doing whatever you need to do (except feeding everything to Fred), and then use Cht.3 to start stuffing one more unit you want to train- Sumia and Miriel are the most popular choices, and Stahl can be a good idea too but is harder to do. Cht.4 is similar but there are less feeding opportunities and it's OK for Fred to do more fighting. Somewhere around post-Cht.4, Par.1 or Cht.5 (depending on what order you've been doing things and who's getting trained), Avatar should use the Renown Second Seal to reclass at Lv.19-20. Dark Mage is a good option if you need to keep your Def and Tomes, Merc and Cav are strong physical options. Par.1 is another strong location for feeding your other units. Once you hit Cht.6, you'll want to have at least one non-Avatar/Fred unit capable of helping out in combat as a lead without either of them supporting (ideally). After Cht.6, things quiet down and you should do whatever it takes to get your S supports and inheritances rolling so you'll be strong after Cht.13- try to get Avatar promoted (at Lv.20) between Cht.8 and 10, and otherwise feed away. Normally you could use your Avatar as an impenetrable wall to help with positioning and giving other units kills, but since you're -Def you'll have to be creative about it. It's still possible, though.

Growth rates aren't really that important. With a small team, you'll have plenty of time to cap all your stats anyway, so classes and availability matter much more. Chrom!Brady really stinks as a unit ingame due to coming with no combat weapon ranks, effectively no skills (all of his are borderline useless), so Maribelle should be at the bottom of the barrel. Sumia really is your best choice bar almost none due to availability and classes, and if you want a son Olivia will work much better than Maribelle (though you may want to dance-grind her a bit to help out the childrens' bases and make Inigo's paralogue easier). Good drop-in male supports are Yarne (especially when fathered by Stahl) and Owain (anyone, but Fred and Libra may be your best bets). If you decide you want a female, Severa (likely Vaike) or maybe Nah (Vaike or Gregor) can perform well.

Fair warning: that guide is an offense against everything intellectual, and you're not even using it for its intended purpose (postgame/DLC, as opposed to an ingame run). So... I think that plan might crash and burn. Basically, Awakening's main story gets harder the more units you use due to the way the enemy stats/AI and the exp formula work. On Hard, it's perfectly reasonable (and likely intended) for you to field the maximum possible number of units, but you'll get in trouble if you try to train more units than you can fit on a map at a time. Making pairings for every single parent is what you want to do when you want a full team of 13 children and Avatar to tackle the harder DLC maps (that's easy to field in one map), not for the main story. If you're planning to do all that anyway, figure out your postgame pairs, and then play through the game with ~half of them, grinding the rest up later. If you're not planning to (though it's pretty fun and if you love Awakening is a very good investment), you'll need to downsize your team significantly. Now Hard is pretty lenient about exactly who your pairs are and generally lets you use whoever you want with whoever else (though units like Ricken and Donnel might have some trouble). In general all you'll care about is making sure you don't have to train anyone who doesn't have a support for an extended amount of time- such as leaving your Avatar with nobody until Tharja rolls around (Chrom would be his standard backup, but he'll be busy early on with Sumia). Using Frederick will also soak up a pretty large amount of exp to keep him relevant, so you might want to go with a smaller team if using him. For Lunatic, which units are good and bad matters a good deal more, and you'll need to keep your team size smaller. For example, Ricken is borderline useless and will do more harm than good paired with Lissa (an otherwise great unit), and Maribelle will effectively pass no weapon ranks to Avatar's kids, a major liability that only Nowi and sometimes Panne can properly overcome. What you should do for Lunatic is start by focusing on Chrom, Avatar and their wives (or just pair them together, but Avatar-M is better for making large teams on Lunatic(+)). Chrom's best option is Sumia, but a dance-ground Olivia can work too if he's really patient. Avatar has several good options: Nowi has incredible growths and with some planning ahead has almost no hump to get over, while Cordelia has a great class set and allows for a double Galeforce passdown (which, if done alongside Chrom x Sumia, allows you to have six GF units by Cht.14). Those two are the best, but Panne also can work out due to having an easy time getting off the ground and giving a son whom Lucina can marry for extreme stompiness and Lucina herself can be worth it if you save a lot of Paralogues for building supports. After that, you can add a few more pairs- usually it's best to choose the female first and then pick a husband for them. Staff users are easier to bring along than combat units, so Lissa is a safe pick (she's almost strictly superior to Maribelle) and Libra is an easy drop-in husband for her. Olivia can dance to grind and build support but isn't too common outside of Chrom. Any of Panne, Nowi and Cordelia that don't marry Avatar are very strong. For good husbands, Gregor tends to work out well as a drop-in, and with some effort getting started, Stahl can really shine.

To add to this, keep in mind that even topics posted in the If/Fates subforum can and will show up in the "similarly tagged" box at the bottom of topic pages, especially if it's a common tag like "shipping".

Units who are good tend to stay good, but you'll need to play them differently. Pretty much everything I do, for example, hits exactly 75 Spd, so the moment you take one of the boosters off the table, all those standard sets go out the window. Th reasonable Spd thresholds you'll be aiming for will also be adjusted downwards (so instead of 69/75, you might aim for 60/66), and the units who had the best times hitting 75 before will still have the tools and flexibility to adjust. Basically which units are good won't change too much but the sets and combinations you run on them will significantly.

Not really. No matter how hard you try, you can't make more stats just materialize out of thin air... And that does indeed seem to be what you need to do here. HOWEVER, if you want to have more fun with Lunatic+ Grima, try Mire-critting him to death with Ricken!Laurent!Morgan. It requires a Barracks Boost but should be doable (calculated it around a year ago, never actually tried it).

Just sayin' but your Gerome has a +2 Mag mod and Tomefaire. That's hardly physical-locked.

He's planning a console run, not a TAS. But by eliminating all sources of RNG through careful planning, you can still get TAS-like control over your run.

I feel like Morgan's explanation for existence was fairly solid and hole-free, especially for something pieced together from optional convos in DLC maps.

Same goes for Five-Anna Firefight.

I come up with some base- a theme, goal, or predetermined pairing or two that I want to build the team around ("beat Apo" isn't a very useful goal), and go from there. There's no One Team that you can get from following a formula from the very start. Once I have my base and know what size I want my team to be, I size up my requirements. If the conditions I want my team to meet are lenient enough that I think everyone can meet them, I throw fathers on semirandomly, just making sure I get my goal on each unit, and then shuffle fathers around in mutually beneficial trades until everyone has what they need. Typically I assign child pairs when switching one of their fathers, but they're a good deal more flexible than the parents and sometimes all but one or two wait to the end to be done. On the other hand, if my requirements have some strict goals that not everyone can or needs to hit, I focus on the different tasks that need accomplishing and try to build pairs for each one. I usually go about this by treating differently fathered versions of the same child as separate units valued in terms of power and opportunity cost (for example, having a Virion!Severa means I can't get a Virion!Yarne), and then getting the lowest cost pair that can do each job, in order of hardest job to easiest job, while still making sure that all my pairs are good for general combat. Once that's done, I look over how much leeway I have and sometimes swap similar fathers that will still get the job done but provide a boost elsewhere, but those swaps are usually fairly complex. My current general strategy focuses on hitting 75 Spd and then maximizing Mov and Atk. 220 Hit is another benchmark, as is 160 combined Skl (but that's not something everyone goes for). Doing this ensures that a pair will be able to do anything you might ask them to do that another pair could reasonably do as well, giving you a large amount of freedom in the map itself. You can also step down to 69 Spd- the next highest significant Spd threshold- if you feel like you'd have to make significant sacrifices to hit 75. Not everyone plays this way, but it works well for me and is suited for answering the most common types of questions I answer ("I ship X and Y, how do I make them/their children as good as possible?"). As for general skillsets, female leads use LB/GF/Faire/Proc and either another proc or All+2 (Lucina uses DSt+ in place of her Faire). Males with GF use LB/Agg/GF/Faire/Proc, and males without use LB/Agg/Faire/All+2/+Hit skill. Females without GF do all sorts of things and there's no general formula. These are more of guidelines than hard rules and it's totally fine to break them, but if you're going to do that make sure you know why you want to. Need a beginning point for your team, and have no gameplay goals? That's what aesthetics are for. Same reason I usually do: the list is from memory and changes every time. Forgetting Avatar and Morgan is just a derp, though. I'll do them when I'm more awake. No need to apologize- I'm under no obligation to be here, and if I found helping people to be boring in the least I'd pack my bags and leave. Questions give me stuff to do and a reason to keep coming back. Inigo: Since he has Nah as a ferry, he's not obligated to remain in Paladin (especially since you're not packing a Faire). You could run anything you want on him (though Nah won't hit 69 Spd without a +Spd pairup). Notably, Hero in Inigo reaches 75 Spd. Cynthia: If she's going to be packing Axes, she may benefit from swapping husbands with Kjelle to get a Hex boost. Her Hit will be OK, but not fabulous. Noire: Be warned that both her and Owain will fail to hit 69 Spd (and Noire can't even if you give her All+2). That's a really slow pair, and not what you want for a Double Bow user. I'd strongly recommend getting a better Sniper. Morgan: She's fast enough to upgrade to DF for more Skl and flight, actually. I'd recommend doing that and switching from Luna to Ignis, unless you just like Valkyries. Brady hits 75 either way so he doesn't care what she does. Severa: She could be your team's Sniper. As-is, she'll hit 69 perfectly with a Sage and no All+2. It's also possible to swap Virion and Stahl here, since Gregor!Laurent has high potential to switch to physical and you could then run another Wyvern x Berserker set if you want (and Yarne can probably use the Str more than Severa). More Severa Skl, too. Her and Laurent might even be within range of 100% DS if you wanted to reach for it. Lucina: DSt+ doesn't stack with itself, so her and Chrom at A with one of them using it will have the same DS as someone with S and no DSt+. Chrom is still an exceptionally good unit, but Lucina may see more use out of a Gerome S support. It's up to you, though. Before trying to get a ton of VV pairs, figure out whether you even want one. It may be famous, but it's neither necessary nor even that great (in general). VV pairs don't play well with the rest of your team, tend to feel extremely redundant on non-challenge runs, and can be difficult to use safely. I never recommend throwing one in "just because"- only use one if you already know what you need it to fight and why it's a good option to get the job done. Same here. Noire and Nah have very similar roles but Noire is just a little less interesting to me, and Laurent does everything Gerome does but better.

Given the context of that post I think it's pretty amazing that it's as relevant as it is (though that's far from the only thing wrong with it). Don't read, ask. All my advice is given on a per-person basis and usually only general if I say it is. That said, the Pairing Thread is definitely the best place to ask.

So someone asked me to elaborate on my general list of good pairings and I thought I'd put my response here instead for all to see. I don't know if it's been discussed in detail, but realizing that I could do that (with a +Skl Avatar) was what got me started making my 100% DS team.

Potato why are you here now and not in the stream?

The story did well up until the point when one would normally start adding more exposition and advanced motives. Then it got distracted and instead went to go do something else. Too bad.

Quick word on non-GF leads (girls without GF who aren't hard supports): The husband having Agg is certainly an incentive (dropped kills with full Rally/LB and Braves do happen, believe it or not), but a potentially more significant draw is the fact that they lack Agg. This has two main effects. First, lacking both Agg and a class that warrants +Hit skills (Berserker), there's not actually a lot of stuff you'd want to run on a hard support female. You've got LB, a Faire, possible Hex/Anathema (but Hit shouldn't be a problem anyway), All+2, maybe Str+2... Which is a) boring and b) not all that good. And if you're giving up a possible GF (usually in Noire's case), odds are you're doing it because you think what you'll get out of it is better than what you're losing. Second, there happens to be a pretty large amount of stuff you can do when you have four completely free skillslots at your disposal- no GF or Agg to have dibs on them. That's not all that common (unless you're deliberately running around without them for fun), so you might as well make use of it and leads are way better than supports at finding extra things to do with skillslots. A good example is Lon'qu!Noire, who has a +5 Spd mod and Wyvern Lord. Pretty much the same as Gaius!Kjelle... But Kjelle doesn't have enough room to run both Luna and Astra alongside All+2 to hit 75, while Noire does, making her a more powerful Wyvern Lord in single combat than either Kjelle or Severa (just without GF). That's completely ignoring whatever her husband is doing, and a set you can't run (75 Spd procstack Wyvern) with GF unless you're +7 Morgan. And of course, there's always the added benefit that females tend to be in high Mov classes more often than males, making them the desired units to end your turns on.

Nope, no Dancer Morgan. Donnel has several issues that make him generally considered a bad unit on Lunatic(+). The main one is that he comes early, starts slow thanks to his bad bases/weapon rank, requirement of an extremely valuable Second Seal, and getting reset to E Swd (never make him a Fighter, Merc is much better), and then gets good for midgame thanks to Aptitude. But once he's capped, he's capped. He has an extremely small class pool so he can't hop around to pick up extra skills and get into a good final class, and he has terrible mods. So once you get to around Cht.22 and all the enemies are catching up to your capped team... He's back to useless, with no stat advantage over your other units and a ton of flaws. This would be all fine and dandy if the mode was normally easy in the beginning and the end and hard in the middle, because then he'd be strong at the point where you need power the most. But it's not, it's very hard in the beginning and end and gives you a massive break in the middle- so Donnel is a wuss when you need help, and he's helping when you don't. Basically he's not aligned whatsoever to what your team needs. Compare someone like Yarne, who also starts in a bad class that he must instantly leave and start with E weapons and counters that with high growths: Yarne comes in the middle of the game when the going's easy (and is already Lv.10) and Second Seals are plentiful, and while he has a bad initial class set that can be fixed with a good father (especially Stahl). He also has incredible mods and can marry 2nd gen, allowing him to stay extremely powerful and relevant through the end of the game, when you really need it. tl;dr Donnel doesn't do his job very well. He can still pass Aptitude to someone, but the children are all already growth units and won't really see a difference big enough to make up for the investment in getting Donnel off the ground. He also has major (moreso than everyone else) issues with Counter, as Kuroi outlined. If you still want to use him, more power to you, but know that it's considered a challenge run for a reason. If you want to add some easy exp efficient units to your team, pile on the Staffbots. Lissa is a great candidate due to her availability, and Sumia and Cordelia can go Falco either after or if they're not going DF. Libra is an easy drop-in and can also easily marry another staffbot to give you another child (usually hard support Owain with a DSp+ inheritance). Maribelle works too but is generally an inferior version of Lissa except with Demoiselle, and Anna has Thief/+Mov utility on top of enough bases to take a hit all through Valm even without investment. Once the staffers get going later on, they can make valuable combat contributions (especially in the Pegs' cases if you got GF first). I'd advise pairing Avatar with someone who has good availability and can benefit from his pairup bonuses (though I have used Avatar x Olivia on vanilla Lunatic with some dance spamming and saved Paralogues and it turned out very well anyway).

But Nah's Skl and weapon type are likely to be better than Yarne's, so she's closer to the threshold. If you use Stahl on her, she probably won't be running Hit+20. Burns are really bad in Apo, by the way.

It's less of how much he needs it boosted and more of what number does he want to hit. 220 will give you 100% on all non-bosses in S.Apo, and you'll need to be a bit higher (257 iirc) for 100% on all bosses. Weapon Triangle matters too, though, and 100% Hit still doesn't guarantee dual strikes.

I'll be gone starting friday, fyi.

That's not the kind of randomness Kuroi is talking about, the stuff that's been happening to us is completely inexplicable by just watching recordings and counting support gain by the traditional method. It's most likely some form of hidden jealousy system like FE4, but nobody understands the ins and outs of it yet. It's less of a "you're a legend" thing and more of a "welcome to the club". That said, congrats and welcome to the club! Well, if you get it working, post again. I'd strongly advise doing a test stream first to make sure you're capable of broadcasting a (decent) picture, have your audio working, etc before you actually try to stream any content. But once it's up I'll come take a look, if I'm around.

None of Sully's options are that great. Gregor is the best. Libra and Stahl both work very well with Olivia. Inigo is the better Avatar-F pairing, Olivia is the better Avatar-M pairing. Ricken is Tharja's best option there. Miriel can take any of them and be fine, but Henry contributes the least and is probably better elsewhere. Both of those will work great for Cherche. I like Virion slightly more. Nowi will be fine with Donnel, Gregor or Ricken, but none of them are her top choice. All of Chrom's options are great, but Sumia is the best.

You're not supposed to read the whole thing (the first half is full of terrible advice), you're supposed to post there instead. It's where all the gurus hang out. Anyway, simply maximizing mods and stats isn't a very helpful goal because if you add up a character's mods, the totals will always be around 0-2 (with some characters like Avatar, Panne and Nowi being significantly higher), so you'll see only a very small difference in total stats. So you have to choose which stats you want to maximize and which you're willing to sacrifice to do that, and that's a little more subjective than simply having "the best". Furthermore, getting one stat to be extremely high isn't always a good thing- for example, once you're doubling everything and have 100% Avo against everything you care about, what use is more Spd? Once you can kill anything in one round of combat before they can damage you, what use is more Atk? To an extent, boosting your stats will also have diminishing returns before you hit that functional maximum as well, so you need to weigh whether having a little more of a high stat is as important as having a little more of a low stat. Basically, there's no such thing as a best set of pairings, but you can still make a very good one if you put in a little work understanding what you want and why you want it.