Czar_Yoshi

Depends on the map. Most are affected by Normal/Hard/Lunatic (specifically the Spirit Talismans (Einherjar) maps and Future Past, don't remember about the Challenge Pack and Scrambles but I'm pretty sure they are). The Golden Pack and Apo aren't affected by difficulty at all, though, and I think only Future Past gets extra skills from Lunatic+.

It probably bugs you because Berserkers are incredibly hideous in this game. If you don't want to turn battle animations off, you can go as a Warrior or General instead but will loose an important double in Apo. Lucina is a Sniper so she can use Longbows and have a 100% chance of getting in four DS hits from Avatar, which can fell just about anything in the game. Surely ye jest. Let's say two units have a 50% DS rate. That means you'll only get a miss one in two times on average. Now say you bump that up to 60% with DS+. You're now getting a miss one in 2.5 times on average. You just got a real performance increase of 25%. That's pretty good, right? Now say you've got 60% normally and then put DS+ on. At 70%, you're seeing a miss one in 3.33 tries. That's a 33.33% real performance increase, which is 8.33% more than the increase gotten from going from 50% to 60%. Let's go up to 70% and put on DS+ to reach 80%. Now it's a miss every 1 in 5 tries- a 50% real performance increase, which is 16.66% more than the increase going from 60% to 70%. Again! 80% to 90%, misses every 1 in 10 tries! That's a 100% real performance increase- you've just halved your odds of failure. 50% more than the increase from 70% to 80%- the increase in your odds has more than doubled, and is increasing faster each time. See where this is going? 90% to 100% next, which... never misses. Infinity% real performance increase. Infinitely greater performance increase than 80% to 90%. Before, it was just more than double, now it's infinity. Combine that with 100% hitrates, and you will never fail to get that KO. Never. bar player error, of course, but that's not the RNG's fault. Never underestimate the infinite increase in reliability between something that can fail and something that can't.

Libra will get a little outclassed later on but by virtue of having Staves and good Mag he can stay relevant for a long time even with very little investment. You should probably start scaling him down once you recruit Owain. If you have a Seal for him, Sage is probably a good choice, but more for his own higher Mag than Lissa's (a high range Rescue is nice. Two medium range Rescues are much nicer).

Beastbane doesn't do anything on non-Taguels. There aren't any Valkyries in Apo, wind magic only shows up on one round, NS will ORKO you whether you have Iote's Shield or not and the rest of the bows will 2HKO regardless as well. It doesn't do much. As far as I know, Slow Burn ceases to have any effect after turn 15. That Brady is missing GF. DG+ doesn't stack. +Hit/Avo skills will work in the back but since it's not that unit getting attacked the +Avo won't do anything and they'll just get +Hit. and

Spd is completely irrelevant on male hard supports (what your Avatar will be if you're minmaxing) due to never being up front, so being in a class with low Spd won't matter. That said, Avatar-M's best physical option by far is to be a Berserker with LB/Agg/AF/All+2/Hit+20 and marry Sumia!Lucina@Sniper (LB/GF/Aether/Luna/DS+).

Counter+procs+1-range braves on everyone.

Chrom!Cynthia is so far out of other Cynthias' leagues it's not even funny. She's fabulous. Anyway, you're not going to be able to get a full team going ingame, just so you know. It's pretty hard to pull more than five pairs at once without grinding. If you are using DLC (which I assume you are), then offense > defense as you can just KO everything before it touches you- so things like PavGis and Sorcs won't be very useful. So are you primarily caring about ingame, postgame skirmishes, or...?

Chrom won't be getting much himself prior to Cht.7, just helping Sumia get hers. Once you're there, though, even base Chrom on a Mountain with a decently leveled S sumia support can dodgetank and KO Wyverns all day and catch up easily there. Getting the S takes a bit of care, especially if you're postponing the Paralogues (a good thing to do if you can get away with it): after their C from Cht.3, each support takes one map of combat plus either a Barracks event, Event Tile boost or Seed of Trust. You get one Seed for free, and doing Par.1 gives you another boost, but that means you have to get at least one well placed event tile for them (I usually go for the Cht.4 one). Miriel is a real glass cannon and you will need to treat her carefully, but she can be one of your heaviest hitters as early as Cht.5, making her well worth it early on. Later on Laurent will take her job. Ingame, his Paralogue is the last to be unlocked (Cht.16) and he comes as a Priest, giving him no useful skills or weapon ranks. Males also have a pretty poor selection of magical classes, so his growths are out of place on him too. So yeah, he kind of is really bad. Maribelle can get Demoiselle without a Second Seal. That alone is reason enough to use her, even if her child is lackluster. Of course, she really will do best if you use both her and Lissa: then Lissa can promote to start doing chip damage as a Sage soon after Maribelle starts getting the lion's share of the staff exp.

When responding inside quotes, you should bold your responses so it's easier to see who wrote what. It doesn't matter that Chrom's DSes aren't terribly strong, they're strong enough to snag a lot of KOes in Lunatic(+). Try getting Sumia to KO Cht.3's Knights without him. Miriel has 6 chapters of availability on Tharja and 10 on Henry. There is absolutely no way those lategame chumps are better than her, especially since she has DM too if you want one. If Avatar leaves Tactician before Cht.5, who's going to be your Wyvern killer? Ricken? Too low of a Tome rank to wield Celica's/Rexcalibur, while Miriel can easily have that with investment. Miriel also has staff utility which is very nice lategame, especially on Lunatic+ with an Avatar-F.

Gaius only gives Cynthia three new promoted classes to work with- she's got awesome mods but isn't too flexible. I'd rate her pretty much the same as Henry!Cynthia, as you're basically trading 1 Mag for 2 Spd and Vengeance for SF Assassin. He'd still be on my recommended list if it weren't for Kjelle, though. She has no other options even remotely close to how good he is. Avatar-F usually either goes Tactician -> Merc -> Hero -> DF -> ending class or Tactician -> Tactician -> GM -> DF -> ending class in Lunatic.

It'll have no effect.

You'll probably wind up getting frustrated if you try to find the children's default hair colors, because doing it different ways sometimes yields different results. Official artwork aside, there are two places in the game where you can encounter children with no parents: in Streetpass teams and in the Future Past maps (both cases assuming that you don't have the child in question's mother married yet). Most amusingly, Morgan-M's hair appears pink. If you really want to dig around for pairings the game may very tentatively suggest as canon, you should look here.

Chrom x Sumia/Maribelle/Olivia Lissa x Stahl/Ricken/Libra/Henry Sully x Donnel/Gaius Miriel x Lon'qu/Ricken/Gregor/Libra/Henry Sumia x Chrom/Henry Maribelle x Chrom/Virion/Lon'qu/Ricken/Libra/Henry Panne x Fred/Virion/Vaike/Stahl/Lon'qu/Gregor/Henry Cordelia x Virion/Vaike/Stahl/Lon'qu/Ricken Nowi x Virion/Vaike/Stahl/Henry Tharja x Donnel/Gaius Olivia x Chrom/Fred/Stahl/Ricken/Libra/Henry Cherche x Virion/Vaike/Stahl/Ricken/Gregor/Henry Generic cookie-cutter pairings. Everyone on that list has everything they need to fill a useful role in Apo, though personal creativity will still get you far more mileage than following a predefined build. There are also a good number of pairings not on that list that, while holding potential, require a more specific strategy to function well (they're not plug-and-play, basically).

The support log has two entries for Avatar and two entries for Morgan (both male and female). Every unit with a customizable appearance- this includes Avatar and all the children except Lucina (their hair color changes based on the father) will appear in the support log as they did in the last file you saved with them unlocked. So, the Avatar-F win the support log will appear as Cara until you start a new file, choose a female Avatar, and save. Then that Avatar will show up, and if you load your original file again and save you'll see Cara back. Only the appearance changes; all Avatars of the same gender count as the same character for support log purposes. The Avatar logbook is probably best described through an example, so here I go. Say I've summoned Mystery -> Katarina's spotpass team and recruited her. She'll show up in my party, and also in the Logbook at the level I recruited her. Then say I raise her a bit and change her class, get some more skills/levels/etc. She's still in the Logbook in the same form as she was when she first appeared there. Then say I load another file that doesn't have Katarina recruited. If I go into the Logbook, she'll be there the same way she appears in the first file- at base. I could recruit her there for gold and she'd join my team at base. Now say I load the first file and go back to Katarina in the Logbook. I have options to recruit and update her. If I try to recruit her, I'll be given the choice to pay gold and get her (she'll replace the one I already have- I'm effectively resetting her to base) or update her. If I update her, the Logbook Katarina will be changed to my own, and will have all the changes I've made. Base Katarina is gone now, and if I go back to the second file to try to recruit her I'll see the updated version. However, if I had recruited base Katarina in my second file before updating her and then gone back to the Logbook after doing so, I'd still have the options both to recruit her for gold (updating the stats of the one I already have to match the one in the Logbook) or update the one in the Logbook, setting her back to base. So you can only have one of each unique Logbook unit at a time in a single file. However, you can get "multiples" of units that are extremely similar but not the same: there's also a DLC Katarina, who counts as a different character than Spotpass Katarina. She'll have a different Logbook entry and be treated as a separate unit. Avatars work the same way: whether you recruit them from Streetpass or save them from the files you play through, they'll be in the Logbook and you can recruit or update them as you like. However, you can't use the Logbook version of your current file's Avatar to update their stats. Because you can create Avatars with identical appearances and traits, you can get an army of identical units this way... Though it's fairly time consuming as you have to make files for and raise each one individually. Also, you can only have 20 Logbook units recruited at once on any one file, and the Logbook only holds 99 units- pretty easy to fill if you're fighting a lot of Spotpass teams, as units get added to the Logbook even if you defeat them but choose not to recruit them. The Logbook sorts units based on recruitment cost, and once it hits 99 adding a new one will delete whoever happens to be the cheapest at the time. There's a Lock command you can check in the Logbook menu that prevents units from being deleted, though.

The Renown system is this game's NG+, though it's not explained very well and often tends to confuse people, so here's a rundown on how it works. You get Renown for clearing battles- 10 for normal chapters, Paralogues, and Risen. I think DLC maps count, but don't remember for sure. You get 50 from battling or recruiting (with gold) Spotpass and Streetpass units, as well, and you can have a cap of 99999. Every time you beat Grima and watch the credits, the amount of Renown that file has at the moment is saved, and when you start a new file you'll automatically have that Renown. However, your Renown is saved even if it's less than the amount that's already saved- if you have a file with 30000 Renown and 50000 saved and beat Grima with the 30000 file, your saved Renown will be set to 30000, so be careful when playing multiple files at once. Usually doing this just means you have to watch 10 minutes of credits again, but if you accidentally delete the file you had the Renown on and it doesn't carry over... Renown is used to unlock the items in the Renown menu. It does not buy them- this is a common misconception. If you have 1000 Renown, it will unlock all the items that require 1000 or less, and you can just take those items. You get one of each per file, and taking them doesn't lower your Renown. There are some extremely useful ones in there, such as a Second Seal (which you can claim after Cht.3. The earliest the game normally gives you one is in Cht.8), so it's good to have at least a little. Anyway, the game letting you play as the villains isn't really anything new- most FE games have actually done it at some point or another. The differences are that Awakening (and SS) allow you to use them outside of dedicated challenge maps, and more controversially tries to explain why they're there, as opposed to just dropping them into your party. They try (flimsily) to explain why they're there, and even allow your Avatar to marry them. If you don't like them, that's just fine. However, you may want to give Yen'fay a chance, as he's got a bit of a different story than just "I survived lol". There's also Priam, who isn't even in the game to begin with and is kind of cool. If you want to grind out supports... The father/child ones are by far the most tedious. Remember that just getting an S support between two parents doesn't cut it; if you get that and leave you'll just have to get it again if you ever want to have those supports in your log. However, as the father supports are all actually just slight variations on the same support, just adjusted for manner of speaking... Many people don't even bother getting more than one of them.

Many things wrong here. Primarily: being frail doesn't make you bad. it means you have to take more care when using them, but that's kind of obvious. If you leave Sumia in range of a Silver Bow on Lunatic that can OHKO her, that's your fault for not taking better care of her, not her fault for being a bad unit. Classic should never make a difference in how god units are because you should never be sacrificing units you plan on using in Casual anyway due to lost exp time and losing support points gained on that map. So what if there are things that can OHKO Miriel on Lunatic(+)? She's got range and a good place to train, should you want to use her, and once Avatar leaves Tactician (around Cht.5-6) you'll have no Tomes if you don't use her. She's frail but completely worth it, and can even take a hit at base in Cht.3 with a Kellam support. Cordelia has enough bulk to take a Lunatic(+) non-Luna+ Cht.8 Arcwind at base with no pairup and live, and with a bit of boosts from pairup/tonic/forge can ORKO back with a Javelin. I don't know how you count that as frail- most units in the game have a really hard time at recruitment and Cordelia is one of the few that can hold her own right away. Both of the Pegs are excellent in Lunatic(+), actually, due to flying utility and being able to realistically get 6 GF units by Valm when married to Chrom and Avatar-M, in addition to being all around great combat units- early dodgetanks and late hit-and-runners. Lunatic Chrom's DSt+, combined with a C support and doubling, gives him a ~70% chance of getting in at least one DS, which is some pretty great offense that early on. He can easily get to C with Avatar by Cht.2 and C with Sumia after Cht.3, and with some care can even hit S with Sumia in time for Cht.6. That's really great. He does fall off if you don't train him, but so does everyone else (it's just less noticeable because they aren't force-deployed). However, thanks to Falchion being effective with WTA against Wyverns, he's possibly the easiest unit in the game to catch back up. Panne's reclass to Wyvern gives her stats roughly on par with Taguel after Beaststone boosts, and thanks to SS lowering her effective level she gains exp extremely fast. If the Bronze Axe bugs you (it's seriously not a big deal), use the cash from selling her Beaststone for a small forge on it. Nowi, with a competent Merc pairup, early Dragonstone+ from Spotpass Tiki, tonics and a Seraph Robe, takes all of one chapter with minimal babying to catch up on Vanilla Lunatic and one or two more before she becomes completely invincible. Seriously, behind Avatar and a few of the children Nowi, Panne, and the Pegs are probably the four best units in vanilla Lunatic. I don't know how you can think they're bad. Basilio comes with Rally Str, and as you're not likely to have a Warrior on vanilla Lunatic (and if you have one on Lunatic+, he's likely to be fighting Grima) that's very valuable for the final chapter. He can also ORKO Generals that lack Pavise+ in Cht.23, and is bulky enough with a Flavia pairup to act as an effective lure in Cht.24. He's no main combat unit but has a great deal of utility, especially on higher difficulties. If anything, I'd rate him lower on lower difficulties because what he brings to the table is redundant and overkill there.

The 9-point system is kind of obsolete and doesn't properly cover how the mechanic works. Most of the most recent stuff known is discussed in the Awakening thread in the Romhacking section, and you could always PM Tables (he knows a lot about it).

If the Brand was the requirement for being able to use Falchion, Marth wouldn't be able to and Chrom!Inigo would right off the bat. I'm pretty sure the two are separate.

1. It's random. 2. She got RNG screwed. 3. Nope. 4. They got RNG screwed. 5. He didn't get RNG screwed (Lissa's still a member of the royal bloodline, even though she didn't have it herself).

Technically, you're not playing on easy mode, you're playing on Normal. And, well, becoming invincible is slightly normal here, so it's aptly named. This comes about because damage and the like is based on addition/subtraction rather than multipliers and the system is designed to work even with extremely low numbers, causing things to get completely out of hand should you manage to get someone ahead of the stat curve. This is pretty easy to do as the exp formula doesn't do nearly enough to promote keeping your team at the same level. The best thing you can do if you don't want it to happen is to field a full team every time and spread your exp as evenly as possible- and get more than a full team into rotation should that not work either. Alternately, a good few of the DLC maps are far above even the final chapter in difficulty, and as they let you tackle them at your own pace you can make them as easy or hard as you want. I'd strongly recommend getting a few (especially the Scramble Pack and Future Past Pack) and doing them after your Hard run. Cht.23 is usually either people's favorite or least favorite chapter in the game, so hopefully you continue liking it.

Sumia, Cordelia and Aversa are all on roughly equal standing for being Avatar's wife. Sumia offers both excellent mods and a second child, as well as being the only of the three with Luna, but is often booked for Chrom already, and Cynthia already has everything she needs. Aversa's mods mesh extremely well with a +Mag/-Def Avatar, and Shadowgift has a good amount of utility in non-Apo postgame. Cordelia has a second child as well, though her mods- while still very good- aren't quite up with the other two- but she's also both not in demand like Sumia is and has good availability for ingame purposes, unlike Aversa. Lon'qu!Yarne!Morgan is one of Morgan-M's strongest options and gives him a lot of versatility, particularly as a husband for Gaius!Kjelle or Virion/Vaike!Severa. Noire doesn't have the stats to make the most of him though, and Lucina tends to make his strengths redundant.

http://www.harmonyofheroes.com/ Everything about this. Track 35 is the best, though.

Being easy is only bad when it makes the game more boring, and as such self-imposed challenges only help with that problem if the difficulty increase makes the game less boring. Can a self-imposed difficulty increase to Skyward Sword do anything about the excessive tutorials and hand-holding? Nope. Challenge runs are great but they don't work on every game. Unfortunately, difficulty is not the one and only factor to take into consideration when choosing what game to play, so that doesn't work. A game could have many selling points but also be rock-bottom in difficulty- would you suggest that I fix that by moving to a game with fewer/different/less important to me selling points that has higher difficulty? If what I want is to play easy game A and be challenged, changing to difficult game B is not a fix for that because I'm not getting what I want- it would be challenging, but not game A and I want both. I don't like... Are Fi and handholding on that list? Yes. And in a discussion about difficulty, they're going to get brought up. But why would someone bring up, say, that Bird in this context? It doesn't make sense and would just be an out-of-context rant against a game that may or may not deserve it. I'm sure Jedi has plenty of other things about SS that bug him, but Fi was the only one relevant to bring up here. Brawl is way more than tripping, but does that make tripping not completely intrusive and annoying?

It's viable, yes, but if you do that you're just using a setup that's the same as all non-Lucina 100% DS builds, so you're losing out on the benefits of DS+ (DF x Sage, Sniper x Berserker etc). The reason DS+ is good is that it allows you to hit 100% without sacrificing all the power of a normal build. ...It's mostly due to language barriers, slightly repetitive questions and me deciding that being blunt was the best thing to do in the situation. Tharja is bad due to causing a pairing imbalance, not having the required skills to be a useful wife to Avatar, and Noire not needing Avatar to get a full set in the first place, and she's especially lackluster compared to Lucina who is one of Avatar's best wives. Also I don't like her.

This seems ever so slightly out of character for Mr. Wright...