Vykan vs Tino

[Vykan12]

AKA a lawyer/politican who recites Shakespeare vs just some chick with rly long blue hair

Bastian and Lucia both suck. Not only do they participate in the least amount of chapters aside from Geoffrey, Ena/Nasir and the Royals, they also have arguably the worst stats of any member on your permanent team. So, undoubtedly using either of them will likely drag down your combat efficiency, so they’re mainly being fielded for supports and cleaning up.

In terms of supports, Lucia only has Ilyana, Janaff and Bastian. Lucia being able to support Bastian is not a point against him since he benefits equally from it. As for Janaff, there’s almost no way he’s being fielded this late in the game since high spd, low att laguz like him and Lethe are complete fail because there’s no strike level gains in this game. So, while even buff people like Muarim are struggling to keep up offensively when silver weapons start to show up, Janaff is starting to become utter crap.

This leaves the loli girl whose constant hunger leads to many humorous sexual euphemisms. But nope, Ilyana has Gatrie, Mordecai and Zihark as much, much better alternatives, and only needs to pick 2 of them for Lucia to be left in the dust. Although Gatrie isn’t that good, if he’s fielded he’s got no one better to support since those don’t help his main issue, being spd and bad movement, and Marcia and Astrid probably don’t want Gatrie, leaving him with Ilyana and lolShinon.

Mordecai is kind of the same thing (win att and def but lacks spd) but he likes how fast that Ilyana support is (only 8 chapters for an A, and they have common availability as soon as Mordecai joins) and would want Ilyana > Stefan anyway since heaven gives crappy bonuses. His only other options are Mist which is a given, and Ranulf and Ulki, who are pretty bad units, so fielding both Gatrie and Ranulf/Ulki is very unlikely.

That leaves Zihark, who supports Ilyana, Brom and Muarim, but although Ilyana isn’t his best option, Ilyana still has a good shot at a B since there’s always the chance that both Brom and Muarim aren’t fielded, or one of them already has a support set with people not including Zihark.

All this to say that Ilyana has better options than Lucia and all those options are pretty available to her, so the odds of Lucia x Ilyana being available is slim to none. Thus, Lucia doesn’t net ANY of her support partners, and since that’s pretty much all she’s being used for, that’s pretty fail.

Bastian, on the other hand, has a slightly more ideal support situation. He’s got Makalov, whose only other option aside from Astrid is Haar, so there’s an extremely good chance that if Makalov is fielded, then Bastian is filling in his B and thus helping out one of the game’s better units. Lucia, again, isn’t worth mentioning since she benefits from it as much as he does and them getting deployed at the same time is a hilarious waste. This leaves the most interesting option for Bastian’s A, Volke.

First of all, Volke’s ONLY support is Bastian, so he doesn’t have any competition to worry about. And before you say windxwind is pretty fail, recognize that Volke’s durability depends mostly on his avo, and an A Bastian gives him +15 avo, so ir’s far from useless. Plus, the support is amazingly fast, as a C takes effect immediately and A is reached in a mere 2 chapters. But this begs a few questions. Why is Volke being fielded? Easy, the farther you get in the game, the more valuable the chests become, as do some of the steal-able items. If you don’t believe me, think of how many more stealable physic staves there are in the lategame than there are before the Serenes Forest chapter, or compare chapter 11’s chests to those of chapter 27 (lol resolve vs a statue frag or a javelin). Thus, Volke is likely to be fielded a lot in the later chapters of the game based on thieving utility alone. The next question is, why the hell is he fighting? Okay, sure he’s kinda bad at fighting when you first get him, but he gets quite a ways better as the game goes on, particularly when stilettos show up. When you think of a chapter such as 23 (the one with Ena as the boss), you’d rather Volke could take out the enemies in chest rooms by himself rather than needing assistance and slowing people down from reaching other enemies, so there’s definitely an element of wanting Volke to be able to handle himself vs small groups of enemies that don’t get in your main group’s way. Case in point, Bastian giving that +15 avo to Volke > Lucia not doing anything for anyone.

There was one last thing I wanted to mention. Part of why Bastian and Lucia fail at life is because their durability sucks, so you’d want their enemy exposure to be minimized. This bodes heavily in Bastian’s favor since he can attack at range whereas Lucia has to always risk getting hit to damage the enemy. This is another thing that contributes to Bastian x Volke too. Since they are supporting, they should be close by, which means Bastian is following Volke in his thieving duties. This is good since Volke isn’t exactly perfect in combat so Bastian can finish off whatever Volke left alive on player phase, which could mean something like Volke being able to open a chest instead of using an elixir. Lucia, on the other hand, isn’t supporting anyone, and doesn’t make for a very good finisher since her atk is horrible and she depends on sheer # of attacks to kill an enemy (doubling = 2 hits, crits turns a hit into 3, giving her adept also gets more hits in), whereas Bastian may only execute one attack, but it is a fairly damaging one since his mag is ok and he can target res. Oh, and he can use stuff like fire vs laguz, thunder vs wyverns, etc more easily than Lucia can get access to longswords and the like.

Managed to make this tl;dr somehow but to conclude, Bastian > Lucia because of supports and having a more useful means for doing chippy damage.

Edited January 9, 2009 by Vykan12