The Lunatic Club

[Thor Odinson]

They are. I wonder about the effective of that outside of a flier-heavy team, though. Falcos and Wyverns with Beastslayer Forges and Hammers and Dark Fliers with Rexcal are certainly capable of swift ORKOs, but otherwise my team tends to be tangled up with the terrain. Most of my failures of going offensive have been with getting severely out-movemented by the Wyverns on the map, enough where I just went "fuck this" and resumed Soltanking. I'm certainly willing to try for a heavy flier team if that's what it gets a strategy different from my usual.

Edited October 31, 2014 by Thor Odinson

[isetrh]

I'm getting a little burned out on my Lunatic+ run (keep making tactical errors on Laurent's paralogue that cost me the map) so I was thinking of taking a break and doing an Avatarless no-grind on vanilla. Avatarless because I want to discourage myself from soloing. How do you get through the early chapters without the Avatar? Frederick Emblem won't work since it's no-grind.

[Kuroi Tsubasa Tenshi]

I usually play chapter 24 semi-offensively. The thing about the terrain slowing down everything can actually be really bad for the enemy, as it's easy for them to get out of sync. Their larger forces are usually threatening because Counter or Luna+ Wyverns can easily come in and throw a wrench into a very carefully thought-out kiting strategy. However, this also works against them because the AI is so aggressive that Wyverns won't think twice about YOLOing off to attack something irrelevant to the concerns of their main force.

So basically what I do is have a cavalry unit kite around the top enemies in a sort of push-and-pull type deal where if their current wave is light on Counter, I'll try to drive them back. Rarely, this will let me push as far as the boss and murder him early on. On the south side of the map, I usually have a foot unit of some sort working through the forest (Warrior!Morgan kind of facerolls his way through this). This unit usually doesn't make it more than halfway across the map because it's usually continuosly fighting, especially with all the Wyverns spawning. The rest of the army hangs back a bit and pushes down the middle, careful to stay out of most enemies' range on EP, though any capable fliers I have will be Rescue-bombing Counter units to keep the rest of the offense safer. If it looks like Rescue-bombing won't be enough, I'll start my remaining combat pairs into range of individual Wyverns to lure them away. The end result is usually an enemy force surrounded by a 'C' that folds in on them to finish them off.

I also want to note a couple alternatives to things said here too:

-Galeforce and Elixirs are all that's needed to be semi-offensive in most cases where Sol might run the risk of getting into too many engagements. If one does not care about turn count, it's pretty easy to use the normal PP turn to pick off a high-priority target, then unequip and Elixir to survive a Counter-heavy EP (assuming there's Luna+ around too, as units far enough ahead of the curve shouldn't really be threatened by non-Luna+ if they're unequipped).

-Chapter 25 can be 2-turned by a strong cavalry unit provided it has Galeforce and Boots. Proper positioning when approaching via the east side of the mountain limits risk to it too. Worst comes to worst and there's bad luck with Counter and Luna+ density, it should still be able to get the boss on turn 3. Alternatively, if Anna's been seeing a lot of use as a support (pretty much all my runs), she should have Acrobat, which will let her do the central mountain rush nearly as well as a Falco (one less Move).

[Thor Odinson]

Yeah, I thought about kiting. My previous runs lend itself better to Soltanking on a fort somewhere, but I think I can probably do a run where I have better tools to do a more offensive approach to this chapter.

[isetrh]

I've heard an Avatarless no-grind Lunatic run is possible, but how do you get through the earlygame (without doing Frederick Emblem and having to grind)?

[Czar_Yoshi]

Train Chrom instead. It's possible to feed him everything in the Prologue by swapping his and Avatar's roles for wave 1, and then using some fancy footwork and a variant of the water trick for the top (along with a bit of luck on the Elthunder Mage kill). From there, he can tank with Fred through around Cht.5 or 6, at which point he'll want to start looking for a new support so Fred can do his own thing. After that, you're out of the woods and can get your midgame powerhouse of choice started using Chrom to facetank for them instead of Avatar.

[XeKr]

Re: Chapter 24. Yeah, spam dat Rescue. The grounded enemies are all heavily inhibited by the terrain as well; the player team is generally more maneuverable and you can take advantage of terrain better. I think I usually have utility units flying by then also (Falco!Lissa, Acrobat!Anna).

By one-rounding stuff on player phase, you clear up the enemy formation to fight them on your terms enemy phase (favorable weapon triangle, terrain, skills, etc). Yeah the flying enemies are annoying, but there has to be some positioning challenge. >_>

Manaketes (can be Tiki with some exp and/or Rallies) and Helswath users (can be Flavia with some exp/Scroll and/or Rallies) can typically take a few filler hits if needed. Avoid-stack Wyverns are pretty similar and still mostly works, except against Valks/Bows. A truly glass offensive strategy will likely require knowing the reinforcement patterns though.

I've heard an Avatarless no-grind Lunatic run is possible, but how do you get through the earlygame (without doing Frederick Emblem and having to grind)?

Using Frederick is fine, especially up to C3, you just need to train other units up before C11/C12 when the enemy starts promoting. There’s actually a lot of exp in early Lunatic as long as you don’t overuse Frederick.

Edited November 1, 2014 by XeKr

[LordFrigid]

For Ch 24, I usually cover the forts on maybe the left third of the map, and let the rest of the reinforcements come. On the upper half, one of the forts is right on the edge of the danger zone of a 2-range Wyvern Lord that will continuously spawn until a couple turns after the Boss starts moving, I stick a Bow or Wind Magic User there. All I remember about the lower half is that it'll spawn a Paladin and a Wyvern Lord...usually I have some sort of Galeforce combination there to deal with them.

Edited November 3, 2014 by LordFrigid

[Inference]

Also, WTF GRIMA? I had to cheese him with dance and rescue to kill him before I got completely surrounded. I could've sworn he was a sad joke on normal/hard mode. Same thing with the Aversa map full of Mire and forged weapons all over the place.

Grima still doesn't pose any challenge in Lunatic modes if you're raising a proper team. Spam Rallies, equip strongest weapon, Dance + Rescue right up to Grima, then wait for Lucina to proc. an offensive skill. Replace Chrom with King Marth if you have to.

Assuming you're properly outfitted, it's a luck-based battle that you'll eventually win, since you have unlimited tries, Rescue, and Dance. Basically Ike vs. BK, but without needing to beat an entire Chapter beforehand.

[Terrador]

Grima still doesn't pose any challenge in Lunatic modes if you're raising a proper team. Spam Rallies, equip strongest weapon, Dance + Rescue right up to Grima, then wait for Lucina to proc. an offensive skill. Replace Chrom with King Marth if you have to.

Assuming you're properly outfitted, it's a luck-based battle that you'll eventually win, since you have unlimited tries, Rescue, and Dance. Basically Ike vs. BK, but without needing to beat an entire Chapter beforehand.

Actually, you don't need to make it a luck-based battle at all. A high-STR Morgan with the ability to quad Grima (any other unit will do, but Morgan's your likeliest bet) can front, leaving Lucina to swing away with Parallel Falchion in the back. In my L+ run I had Brave Bow!Warrior!Morgan front for Great Knight!Lucina, and he dropped like a rock. It's significantly harder if you're trying to full deploy, though. But either way: your Falchion-wielder should be in the back, and someone who doubles with a Brave and a high Dual Strike rate should be in the front. For what it's worth, Morgan didn't even have any offensive procs, and nor did Lucina; it just didn't matter. If memory serves, they did get a Rally Spectrum from Ishtar, but neither got a Rally Strength.

Edited November 4, 2014 by Terrador

[Inference]

Falchion wielder in the back has been tried. They would almost always miss, in my experience. I've begun to accept that the partner was going to be deadweight vs. Grima because of that, else I'd have Chrom do it.

But yeah, this should be an easy one-turn if Chrom is hitting. Even if he missed a couple of times, I have plenty of Rescue users, Lucina, and both Marths waiting for a whack on my file.

(And that 'actually' with the italics was really obnoxious. Just saiyan.)

EDIT: WHAT THE FUCK. I just loaded my own L+ file with pretty much the same shit and Chrom hit all four times. Is this real life?

Edited November 4, 2014 by Inference

[XeKr]

Grima still doesn't pose any challenge in Lunatic modes if you're raising a proper team. Spam Rallies, equip strongest weapon, Dance + Rescue right up to Grima, then wait for Lucina to proc. an offensive skill. Replace Chrom with King Marth if you have to.

Assuming you're properly outfitted, it's a luck-based battle that you'll eventually win, since you have unlimited tries, Rescue, and Dance. Basically Ike vs. BK, but without needing to beat an entire Chapter beforehand.

The difference is, in Hard, you can just Pair Up anyone and steamroll him (and his army is not threatening). In Lunatic, you have to do many things for the most reliability, and there’s a (fairly) strict timeframe of 1-2 turns to do it in (for most teams). Still, like said, there’s no need to rely on procs and it’s possible to push success rates very high, even in no-grinded teams. It also might be more (kinda) reliable to use Brave+Luna instead of Falchion+Aether but eh (Falchion in the back regardless).

Also side note, iirc Ike can kill BK without a skill proc if he hits every phase with max Str (Mist needs to kill the Bishop and accuracy matters). Adept/Wrath or Aether, plus Mist trained and healing makes it fairly reliable overall (probably less than Grima tho). And of course, it’s optional.

Obviously all battles in FE you’ll eventually win there is RNG in both cases, but both these cases in particular require minimal resets. Mostly exercises in preparation (the planning and positioning is fairly trivial) but still it’s very heavily in your favor if you stack it.

Falchion wielder in the back has been tried. They would almost always miss, in my experience.

Bring Anathema/Hex + Olivia and optimize your Rescue chains to get everyone up there in time.

Edited November 4, 2014 by XeKr

[Kuroi Tsubasa Tenshi]

Hex and Anathema is all that's really needed to push Chrom into a fairly reliable hit range. Chrom doesn't even need maxed out Skl or Str (I've gotten thus far multiple times).

I usually run a capped out Avatar as a Dark Knight with the Boots and wielding a Brave Sword (barely even matters if it's forged because non-Vengeance damage will be so low), full set of tonics and Hex/Anathema/Galeforce/Vengeance/whatever (usually Axebreaker) as my skill set. Chrom is a Great Lord and packing a full set of relevant tonics, with around 37+6 Str and 35+2 Skl and Luk. This puts him at a solid 154 hit against Grima's 90-25 avoid. While 89 isn't absolutely reliable, a true hit of 97.69% is pretty good. I usually do rallies if they're around, but this isn't always the case, so I've done runs where all I've had on him is Basilio's Rally Strength. If Chrom's picking up other rallies, he has a chance for even higher hit too. Anyway, assuming we just have Basilio, that's (45+43-50)/2 = 19 damage per hit. All that's needed from him is 5 hits, plus whatever change Avatar can muster (in practice, Vengeance will probably let her cut out one needed Falchion strike). With capped Def and the Def and HP Tonics, Avatar should have enough durability to survive two Ignis procs, even when not a +Def Avatar (although, I don't think that second Ignis buffer would be there with -Def).

With Olivia's help, Avatar can bounce up, chew through a Berserker, Galeforce up to Grima and attack. The way the AI works, it seems that if the designated boss of a map can weaken a target to near death, then it will choose to attack first (if it can make the kill, for some reason, it'll wait until all of its goons have gone first, which can backfire horribly against targets who have Sol or Nos). This means that Avatar gets 8 attacks, up to 6 with Vengeance and Chrom gets up to 8 Dual Strikes. Given that only about half of that firepower is needed to kill Grima, it's very possible to just completely faceroll him during player phase.

[Terrador]

Falchion wielder in the back has been tried. They would almost always miss, in my experience. I've begun to accept that the partner was going to be deadweight vs. Grima because of that, else I'd have Chrom do it.

But yeah, this should be an easy one-turn if Chrom is hitting. Even if he missed a couple of times, I have plenty of Rescue users, Lucina, and both Marths waiting for a whack on my file.

(And that 'actually' with the italics was really obnoxious. Just saiyan.)

EDIT: WHAT THE FUCK. I just loaded my own L+ file with pretty much the same shit and Chrom hit all four times. Is this real life?

Congratulations, you just discovered PEMN! And saying "has been tried" makes it sound a lot more universal than it is; so far as I have seen*, the Falchion wielder sits in the back while a Brave wielder charges in. True Hit means players tend to hit fairly often! Odds are your Chrom has somewhere between good and okay hit on him even without any rallying.

*of the four people I know or have read runs of that do L or L+ well enough to comment on, three worked like this.

[Inference]

Seriously dude, you're being a gigantic douche. Tone it down a notch.

Pretty or not, it's a clean two turn. I'd take an offensive proc over eating reinforcements. Hopefully that one dude from a page ago learned something.

Edited November 4, 2014 by Inference

[XeKr]

snip

Mostly agreed (I think there needs Ire terrain somewhere in there) and in addition, Rally Spectrum isn’t too uncommon, if using a full team, to have on Robin or children or Einherjar. In a bow-based team for Lunatic+, maybe even Rally Skill. Plus there are skills like Charm, Outdoor Fighter, etc that Chrom (or Lucina) might have.

Also, in general, note that 2 turns is indeed safer, since you can completely remain out of enemy ranges 1st turn while moving up a lot. This allows Olivia to give an extra player phase attack (could even rescue her back or something for safety if enemy phase is needed?) and more chip in general. The whole team can get involved.

[Terrador]

Seriously dude, you're being a gigantic douche. Tone it down a notch.

Pretty or not, it's a clean two turn. I'd take an offensive proc over eating reinforcements. Hopefully that one dude from a page ago learned something.

I was never saying it was a one-turn for the map. I meant that it was a pretty reliable one-combat go if done properly.

Also, undo the calamity that is your mammaries, etc.

[Czar_Yoshi]

Y'know, you kind of are being rude.

Some Grima math:

Thanks to Ire, Grima does indeed have 110 Avo. Without Ignis, it has 70 Atk, and with it it has 90 (80% Ignis). Assuming one is bothering with an HP tonic, it takes 48 Def to reliably take two shots from Grima. Also note that when making Atk calculations to see who will go after you next, the AI doesn't take procs into account so you can actually be a little under half (with Vantage) and Grima can still go before the mooks.

Anyway, my preferred method for dispatching Grima is to use Lucina supporting a Warrior with a Brave Bow. Assuming the Warrior has no procs, but a +5 mt forge on that Bow, it'll be doing around 10 damage minimum per shot (plus some for mods, and maybe extra pairup bonuses from Lucina), while Lucina will be doing (assume GL) around 15 per strike. That's an ORKO assuming everything hits (she'll be looking at around a 90-95% DS rate with DS+ and an S support, and likely has around 95 listed Hit), and there are plenty of unlisted sources of extra damage that could give you a 1 miss safety net, without even looking at EP (no, I haven't included Rally Str in those calcs. Up to 16 extra damage alone from that).

So yeah, a well built team can take him down without any worries. A team that's not equipped to handle him, however, might not even be able to pull it off with perfect RNG.

[Kuroi Tsubasa Tenshi]

Oops, yeah, dunno how I forgot about that. Guess that drops damage by a little too.

I guess that drops it to 69 hit, which is 81.09% true hit; still a pretty respectable number, but not nearly as reliable. That's my really minimal setup, though, so there's plenty of room for Chrom's hit to grow there.

[Kirie]

I finished my first Lunatic run last night. It was very successful! I did a lot of crazy grinding for scientific purposes, so all of the regular levels were a breeze, with only some of the SpotPass and DLC levels giving me a bit of difficulty. I can see now why people go about team-making in a very different manner when you're doing some of those "post"-game levels, though I managed to pass them all rather well with a bit of thought and strategy. Well, except for Priam's level; the only "thought" and "strategy" that went into that was kiting my Morgan/Cynthia pair until everything but Priam was dead because I somehow had the misconception that you had to defeat Priam with Chrom to recruit him like with Walhart.

I'm taking a break to play through a regular HM run and do some silly things with pairings and such, but I want to start planning my next Lunatic run and I have some general questions that I'm hoping you guys can help me out with. Bear in mind that I'm not particularly good at Fire Emblem and I don't really know a lot of metagame strategies and such, so if I ask something dumb (and I probably will), forgive me. I'll try to explain my thoughts and choices as best as possible.

I'm thinking of doing a low-/no-grind* vanilla Lunatic run with a 5 pair-up team, in-game only. Current team thought is: Chrom/FeMU, Nowi/Gaius, Olivia/Henry, Morgan/Nah, Lucina/Inigo.

(* As I said earlier, I'm not particularly good at these games or anything, nor well-versed in metagame knowledge. In fact, I don't think I've played an actually difficult mode of FE without grinding since... god, my last HHM run that was probably 8 years ago. As such, I may end up allowing myself some small measure of grinding for some things, but I haven't quite decided how much, or if I even will)

1) Is 10 characters in 5 pairs a reasonable amount of characters for such an endeavour? Too many? Too few? On one hand, I want to make sure I can accomplish what I need to accomplish, on the other, I don't want EXP and Seals spread too thinly.

2) How does my character composition look? This is my first draft of choices and I haven't begun any formal planning yet, so I haven't made decisions on things like skill sets and classes yet, just kind of based on feeling.

- Chrom is a must to carry around throughout the game, so I figured pairing him with the Avatar would be the best option there, which gives good stuff to Morgan and Lucina, too. With those two pairs done, I want a male and female child to pair with both of them.

- I opted for Nowi for Nah, partially because of how useful Nowi is without needing much help, and decided to pair her up with Gaius since he gives some good mods and access to Galeforce and Sol to Nah, which could be very useful. Nah and Morgan get to be best of friends.

- The Olivia pairing is the one I'm most hesitant on. I haven't really used Olivia much; I've never been particularly good with Dancers. I know that general thought is that Dancers are Good, though, so I figured I could give her a go, and that brings Inigo to the table for Lucina. Her husband was another tricky matter. I like the idea of Henry as a father the best, but I'm worried about training him and matching him up with Olivia because of how late he comes, especially since I'll still likely be putting work into Olivia at that point, too. Virion and Lon'qu were father runner-ups that also come sooner; advice?

- Another option of course would be to forget Olivia and go for a different male child to pair up with Lucina. Owain would probably be my next choice, and Lissa's likely to get some good experience early game anyway. Libra or Henry would probably be my go-to choice for father in that case, and I wouldn't have to worry about double training with Henry like I would with Olivia. The biggest problem here is that I've also found Lissa kind of fragile for mid-/late-game. Brady could also work, but Maribelle has the same problems as Lissa, and comes later without the benefit of all that healing EXP in the first few levels.

3) More of a generic question, but with this size of a team, and assuming minimal-to-no grinding, approximately how much reclassing will I be able to do for each character? And what, exactly, is the limiting factor: EXP, Seals, Money? Would I be better off reclassing as many characters as possible pre-promotion to make use of increased EXP gains, or getting characters promoted before reclassing for survivability and to spend less time in classes to get desired skills? Or are all of these questions too generic and really something that is decided on a character-by-character basis?

4) I've never done much with Rallying and rarely use dedicated Staff wielders. It's not been an issue for me before, but for this run, is this something I should reconsider and look into more to make use of, or would it be unnecessary?

I think that's all for now. Much thanks in advance. <3

[Kuroi Tsubasa Tenshi]

Five combat pairs should be perfectly fine. Depending on playstyle, EXP might get a little thin, but a conscious effort to keep the weak link up should fix that rather handily.

Inigo is, unfortunately a fairly weak choice for a no-grind run. Olivia is generally not going to be very powerful unless you delay chapters to Dance abuse. He also comes in in a paralogue with rather high level promoted enemies, meaning he's unlikely to see training during his recruitment chapter. You could save some of the base paralogues for him, but that means missing out on some early game advantage. Henry as the father, with his late joining time, would likely exacerbate things. Owain is probably a safer bet.

With most gen 1 characters, you can probably go to tier 1 level 20, promote, then reclass at 15 and get to around 10 in their second tier 2 class (Avatar excluded because Veteran kind of breaks the game, so she can easily get away with another reclass or two). This is mostly a limitation of EXP, although seals may or may not also become a factor. The could technically go 10 -> 10 ->15 ->10, but this will definitely put a strain on seals unless Anna is feeling super kind. Any of the early gen 2 recruits should be able to do 10 -> 20 -> 15 -> 10-15 with little issue. There will be more and more issues the later the gen 2 characters show up, though.

Rallies are generally unnecessary, but a nice luxury if you happen to have someone passing through a class that gets them. This makes Spd, Str, Mag and maybe Mov the most likely to show up (Spectrum could possibly show up too, but Avatar and kids are such powerhouses that it's a waste to make them go around rallying).

Staff bots are quite nice. Easy access to Concoctions and later, Elixirs, makes them not strictly necessary, but they're still quite helpful for healing and Rescue Staves are quite broken (allowing a unit to assassinate a key target, then get pulled out of the danger zone). Personally, I find little reason not to use them, because Lissa should already be picking up momentum from early game and then the game drops Libra and Anna right in my lap.

[Czar_Yoshi]

I'm thinking of doing a low-/no-grind* vanilla Lunatic run with a 5 pair-up team, in-game only. Current team thought is: Chrom/FeMU, Nowi/Gaius, Olivia/Henry, Morgan/Nah, Lucina/Inigo.

Avatar and Chrom will work well. For Nowi, she really likes Hero supports, and Gaius will need to pass Sol to Nah for her to have it, so you'll want to try to get him there as soon as possible. This might require sabotaging Chrom's training in Cht.7 to give him some levels, and he still likely won't make it there before Ch.8, but you'll want to keep his class route in mind. Also, mods don't really matter in Lunatic- it's growth rates you should be concerned with.

Inigo is indeed one of the most difficult kids to use in nogrind Lunatic (I've pulled it off twice, and it's very tedious/annoying- and this is coming from someone who likes Lunatic+). If you want a different husband for Lucina, Owain and Yarne are your best bets. Personally I'd advise going for Owain as Panne shows up at the same time as Gaius and very close to Nowi, and you don't want exp to get spread too thin in those chapters (7 through 10 are all pretty much free chapters for preparation for Valm). Lissa, meanwhile, has free staff exp, good availability, etc. Depending on how long you want to wait to start building her supports, good candidates for her are Stahl and Libra.

[Kirie]

Wow, glad I asked then, since I had no idea Inigo would prove to be so difficult. I'm definitely not keen on dance abuse either. Looks like I'll be going with Lissa and Owain then, and probably Libra as a dad. I'll tweak the plans for sure when I start looking into skills and growth rates and such (I mostly just glanced at the general kid pages on the main site to get a rough comparison), but it's a good foundation to start with, I think.

I kind of had Gaius in mind when asking about the reclassing progression and limitations, since he's one of the few characters that I already have something for a plan for in that I know he's going to want to go for Sol quickly to pass that on to Nah. So, it's a matter of either swapping him to fighter or quick promotion for a reclass... which ends up being a Second and a Master either way since I'd likely keep him finished as a Hero, so I guess that's not as big of a deal as I thought it might have been.

[Czar_Yoshi]

It can sometimes be a big deal because Seals are incredibly rare early on. You get one guaranteed Second from Renown, and that's it until Cht.8 unless Anna likes you.

You can also Streetpass yourself if you have a second 3ds to sell yourself more seals, but that's obviously not the standard strategy. Or, if you're willing to use DLC, the boss of Harvest Scramble has a Master.

[Blaze The Great]

I finished my first Lunatic run last night. It was very successful! I did a lot of crazy grinding for scientific purposes, so all of the regular levels were a breeze, with only some of the SpotPass and DLC levels giving me a bit of difficulty. I can see now why people go about team-making in a very different manner when you're doing some of those "post"-game levels, though I managed to pass them all rather well with a bit of thought and strategy. Well, except for Priam's level; the only "thought" and "strategy" that went into that was kiting my Morgan/Cynthia pair until everything but Priam was dead because I somehow had the misconception that you had to defeat Priam with Chrom to recruit him like with Walhart.

I'm taking a break to play through a regular HM run and do some silly things with pairings and such, but I want to start planning my next Lunatic run and I have some general questions that I'm hoping you guys can help me out with. Bear in mind that I'm not particularly good at Fire Emblem and I don't really know a lot of metagame strategies and such, so if I ask something dumb (and I probably will), forgive me. I'll try to explain my thoughts and choices as best as possible.

I'm thinking of doing a low-/no-grind* vanilla Lunatic run with a 5 pair-up team, in-game only. Current team thought is: Chrom/FeMU, Nowi/Gaius, Olivia/Henry, Morgan/Nah, Lucina/Inigo.

(* As I said earlier, I'm not particularly good at these games or anything, nor well-versed in metagame knowledge. In fact, I don't think I've played an actually difficult mode of FE without grinding since... god, my last HHM run that was probably 8 years ago. As such, I may end up allowing myself some small measure of grinding for some things, but I haven't quite decided how much, or if I even will)

1) Is 10 characters in 5 pairs a reasonable amount of characters for such an endeavour? Too many? Too few? On one hand, I want to make sure I can accomplish what I need to accomplish, on the other, I don't want EXP and Seals spread too thinly.

2) How does my character composition look? This is my first draft of choices and I haven't begun any formal planning yet, so I haven't made decisions on things like skill sets and classes yet, just kind of based on feeling.

- Chrom is a must to carry around throughout the game, so I figured pairing him with the Avatar would be the best option there, which gives good stuff to Morgan and Lucina, too. With those two pairs done, I want a male and female child to pair with both of them.

- I opted for Nowi for Nah, partially because of how useful Nowi is without needing much help, and decided to pair her up with Gaius since he gives some good mods and access to Galeforce and Sol to Nah, which could be very useful. Nah and Morgan get to be best of friends.

- The Olivia pairing is the one I'm most hesitant on. I haven't really used Olivia much; I've never been particularly good with Dancers. I know that general thought is that Dancers are Good, though, so I figured I could give her a go, and that brings Inigo to the table for Lucina. Her husband was another tricky matter. I like the idea of Henry as a father the best, but I'm worried about training him and matching him up with Olivia because of how late he comes, especially since I'll still likely be putting work into Olivia at that point, too. Virion and Lon'qu were father runner-ups that also come sooner; advice?

- Another option of course would be to forget Olivia and go for a different male child to pair up with Lucina. Owain would probably be my next choice, and Lissa's likely to get some good experience early game anyway. Libra or Henry would probably be my go-to choice for father in that case, and I wouldn't have to worry about double training with Henry like I would with Olivia. The biggest problem here is that I've also found Lissa kind of fragile for mid-/late-game. Brady could also work, but Maribelle has the same problems as Lissa, and comes later without the benefit of all that healing EXP in the first few levels.

3) More of a generic question, but with this size of a team, and assuming minimal-to-no grinding, approximately how much reclassing will I be able to do for each character? And what, exactly, is the limiting factor: EXP, Seals, Money? Would I be better off reclassing as many characters as possible pre-promotion to make use of increased EXP gains, or getting characters promoted before reclassing for survivability and to spend less time in classes to get desired skills? Or are all of these questions too generic and really something that is decided on a character-by-character basis?

4) I've never done much with Rallying and rarely use dedicated Staff wielders. It's not been an issue for me before, but for this run, is this something I should reconsider and look into more to make use of, or would it be unnecessary?

I think that's all for now. Much thanks in advance. <3

1) In my mind, 10 is the magic number. I think it is a generally agreed on number by most as well. 5 pairs is solid.

2) Chrom is good if you use him, at least sort of. If you get him up high enough (i.e. promoted and with Aether) he can actually be really good around the end of Gangrel arc/beginning of Walhart arc. He usually drops off in usefulness as a combat unit once the children have reached combat readiness levels, but even then he can be a solid support unit, especially with Defender and Dual Strike+.

I don't know much about Olivia in Lunatic Mode. She could be okay, but I probably wouldn't use her. Same with Henry, he is just too weak when he joins. You can try using them though.

3) On my low-grind run, I have had enough experience to get pretty much every character I am using to 20/20 and then have them reclass at least once. So, plan to use at least 7-8 Second Seals if you want to use a lot.

4) Rally Skills and healbots are actually something I would highly recommend on Lunatic. Rally Spectrum has saved me lots of pain several times, and I strongly suggest that you have at least one unit pick it up.

And, for my own update. I am just about to fight Paralogue 17 and then Chapter 19.

My current pairs with classes and skills: (skills to be added are in parentheses, if they are right next to another without a comma, it will replace that skill)

Annilese Level 5 Dark Knight Armsthrift, Patience (Lifetaker), Sol, Veteran, Slow Burn

Lucina Level 1 Dark Flier Veteran, Dual Strike+, Charm (Galeforce), Aether, Rightful King

Morgan Level 4 Great Knight Veteran (Luna?), Rightful King, Sol, Ignis, Rally Spectrum

Chrom Level 3 Paladin Charm, Aether, Dual Strike+, Rightful King, (Defender)

Miriel Level 13 Valkyrie Magic+2 (Dual Support+), Resistance+2 (Tomefaire), Demoiselle, Rally Resistance, Focus

Laurent Level 5 Sorcerer Magic+2 (Tomebreaker), Focus, Rally Resistance, Anathema, Vengeance

Cordelia Level 8 Hero Speed+2 (Axebreaker), Relief, Armsthrift, Patience (Lancefaire if I can pull it off, which is doubtful), Sol

Severa Level 1 Bow Knight Armsthrift, Patience, Sol, Luna, (Bowbreaker)

Anna Level 1 Assassin Locktouch, Movement+1, Lucky 7, Acrobat

Libra Level 5 War Cleric Healtouch, Miracle, Rally Luck, (Renewal if he somehow got to level 15)

That's pretty much it. I have Chrom-Annilese for my only current married pair that is still in action together, but I will also be marrying Laurent-Lucina and Morgan-Severa. Please feel free to leave advice on anything else you think I could do. Thanks everybody!