FE9 LA Tier List

[General Horace]

you can give nihil to two units with her though.

nihil is just way too strong to not be a big deal.

[Ema Skye]

If Tauroneo can be top tier for requiring a bunch of resources and allowing your team to have a second resolve, I see no reason why Calill can't be high tier for requiring resources to allow your team to have a second Nihil.

Nihil is one of the best skills in the custom skills metagame because it shuts down so many strategies.

[General Horace]

Nihil is better than resolve too.

[Tables]

Not trying to imply anything here, but can someone link me to a game with a Nihil!Calill where Calill's contribution was at least vaguely significant? I'd like to get an idea of just how much impact it can have, and how viable Calill can actually be.

[General Horace]

Refa's last game against pkl she did a lot of damage.

[Espinosa]

Tauroneo can function decently enough without any resources, but works best with some investment.

IMHO, Resolve > Nihil in context. Nihil just closes doors to some skill-related schemes, but Resolve is a tremendous offensive skill, and Tauroneo just happens to be a very good user of Resolve, as he his potential for very high bulk enables him to control (to some extent) how much HP he has when he enters it and destroy a half of your team while you're in a rush to take him down. The recent Nihil/Parity-themed teams may have given the impression that shutting down skills goes before everything else, but if you're running both Calill and Nasir and there are no Generals on the other side you kinda wasted your time (Nasir won't double too many notable units with just 2 wings, but still some 26 AS ones). Running Nihil without stats to back it up won't make the unit instantly good.

I can't deny it's usually a good idea to run Nihil alongside Resolve, though... because of other Nihils. Yeah. So I acknowledge that there's a good deal of truth in what I'm arguing against here.

Tables: Athena's Calill destroyed the earlygame in the round 1 game, but ZM had some misplays. Horace and Refa also used her well in the recent games. She's mostly an armourkiller and, as stated earlier, Nihil and res-hitting "chip" off maxed 30 mag (implies no Runesword Ike/some sword gal; +3 atk max from a Geoffrey support; +1 atk from Neph) means you can attack a Resolver without worrying about their avoid, or not have to guess if the target has Vantage.

[Tables]

Okay, thanks. I've looked them up, and yeah I can definitely see the argument for Calill up.

[AnonymousSpeed]

I think Calill has done well enough to move up.

Honestly this is just a filler post so this thread will show up in my content page.

[Espinosa]

Think Nasir would be a good candidate for G-d tier, alongside Ragnell Ike? The only reason I didn't previously move him up to Top is because I didn't want to break the sequence in the write-ups, really.

Technically, this isn't necessary with better rules applied dragons, but none have been agreed upon yet, so maybe I'll just let him be for now. I mean, we don't have a separate tiering for Giffca/Naesala/Tibarn that assumes boosters/custom skills, do we?

[Espinosa]

Geoffrey into High tier? He has great synergy with Nihil teams, bolsters Elincia's offence and hit, and is the only Paladin who can get as much as +4 atk from his supports (way more than any of the 5-6? other Paladins). His booster reliance is his only weakness (as well as 20 SP, but I think by now people understand that fragile units with fancy skills die much sooner to the VK and brother bonds... or just any attacks in general).

[General Horace]

he's just as good as Kieran at least in my mind, he has the higher base defence, and speedwings aren't as hotly contested as other resources. His supports are kinda lame though, since both units he supports take the durability boosters, and paladins in general are a lot better with the extra 7 hp, and in his case, 27 defence. Something that does hurt him though is no Vague Katti access.

[Refa]

I don't see how he has great synergy with Nihil teams actually considering how much he needs Speedwings and Nihil teams are strapped for those as is.

[Elieson]

Great synergy on a nihil team often means not running Eli.

He's just a good filler unit and is only good because a nihil team itself is incredibly good. He's kinda defensive and has Two weapons, but needs help still. Oscar and Rolf are always High tier for solid reasons. Geoffrey only fits in because he supports Calill

Edited March 19, 2014 by Elieson

[Espinosa]

- G-d tier (added to Banned together with Ragnell!Ike)

Class: White Dragon

Everything said about Ena applies to Nasir as well, with caps being very similar. Weak to thunder magic and anti-laguz weapons when not protected with the Full Guard, which usually happens when his Laguz gauge runs out and the player is forced to switch to the Demi Band in order to keep Nasir fighting.

Nasir's white breath attack is less accurate than Ena's breath, and thus his attacks will miss more often, especially against evasive foes with high luck and/or Earth supports. Luckily, those cannot quite penetrate Nasir so he can take his time poking them repeatedly until they roll over and die.

Transformation: 5/20

Same as Ena. Nasir either waits for his player's third active turn or transforms on the second one assuming he was attacked twice with the aggressor opening the match.

The only noticeable difference between Ena and Nasir that needs to be pointed out here is that Nasir requires only 2 Speedwings to avoid being doubled by Giffca, most notably, while waiting for his transformation to take place. Nihil being pretty much guaranteed also ensures Nasir isn't anywhere close to dying before he gets his active turns in. A Boyd or Largo Silver Axe crit (with a brother bond) can OHKO Nasir occasionally, as seen in some curious matches.

Stats:

Unit     HP  Str  Mag  Skl  Spd  Lck  Def  Res  acc  avo  crt  sk%  Atk  Hit
Nasir    60   31   11   30   26   19   31   33   79   71   15   -    41  154
capped   80   40   25   36   35   40   40   40 

Behold those enormously inflated White Dragon caps most of which Nasir is rather far from ramming with the stat boosters available.

Before his well-deserved ban, Nasir together with Ena was limited to 4 boosters of any kind that he would share with the rest of the team. Most players opted to capitalise on Nasir's ability to double thanks to going well above the 32 AS needed to double some tough common units like Ike and Rolf by investing 3 Speedwings, sometimes 4, and an Energy Drop to aid Nasir in dishing out scary damage when doubling units, even those equipped with a Laguz Band.

Players quickly understood that units competing for speed stat boosters, such as Boyd or Tauroneo, only get in the way of Nasir crushing the opposing teams and built their teams accordingly, letting Nasir take his wings and wipe the floor with a substantial part of the enemy team.

Doubling most of the meta while being largely impervious to counterattack damage made Nasir a unit you have to keep attacking for most of the game in order to summarily take down, something even Ragnell!Ike cannot quite replicate as well.

Skills:

(Innate) Nihil

By popular opinion, the biggest reason why Nasir is overpowered, and the main reason for using him over Ena (with a two-tier gap between the two).

While Resolve is the superior offensive skill of the metagame, Nihil is the primary defensive means of shutting down opposition's feeble attempts to fulfill any skill-oriented schemes they're concealing under their sleeves. Nasir gets it for free, letting you give a second Nihil to somebody else in the team. Or even third, if Calill is also present in the same team (requiring totally different boosters from Nasir to function well). Add a 4th unit with Parity to such a team and most of the skill combos your opponent carefully elected for the game will simply never appear on the battlefield.

Besides the team aspect of it, Nasir is also a great user of Nihil in himself. Somebody has entered or is about to enter Resolve range? Neutralise them by attacking with Nasir. Want to see who will be vulnerable to Giffca's 50 atk power smacks without having Giffca suffer any damage while Nasir is still fully transformed? Attack with Nasir. It's really hard to go wrong.

Nihil also leaves 25 extra CP for any other skills you may choose to combo with it, which can include any of the following...

Vantage - Nasir will attack first, possibly killing the aggressor before they can cause any harm.

Guard - combos wonderfully with Vantage, not to mention Nihil, attacking first and cancelling the attack. Not too shabby on Nasir's active turns either.

Adept - procs very often with Nasir's high skill and sometimes helps Nasir destroy even the people who think they're safe with a Laguzguard equipped.

Renewal - Nasir is hard to damage and take down, and Renewal lets him stay in for longer. If Renewal is found, the player could rush to kill Nasir ASAP so that the previous attempts to whittle down his HP aren't in vain, and if Nasir still has a lot of his gauge left his revenge will be painful.

40 CP and innate Nihil make Nasir mostly predictable, yet a terribly destructive and sturdy unit, even with Wrath/Resolve banned.

(Occult) Boon

Occult skills being very liberally available to any team you may be building (Aether and Deadeye being the two favourites with very little contest from other skills), there's little reason not to put Boon on Nasir for the possible scenarios where his team members are put to sleep by an enemy Sniper. Except two: it costs 20 CP and Nasir happens to make use of the other potential skill combos effectively. It doesn't seem like clerical duty is in high demand in the meta either, in spite of the occasional Deadeye procs screwing people over.

Comments: It's hard to find any fault in Nasir. Offensively powerful, potentially fast and very bulky, he plays the most dominant role on any team he appears in. The only way to possibly misuse Nasir is to start off with the Demi Band just as the match begins, losing a good deal of his power and speed, -5 atk being the sharpest blow.

Nasir has all the strengths in the world even with limitations on boosters and custom skills, and any attempts to "nerf" him while keeping him a feasible option to feature in teams have mostly failed, Ena being an inferior Nasir being the last hope if one still wants to try out a dragon in the FE9 metagame.

His prowess in battle led to Nasir's ban from the custom skills meta.

[Espinosa]

Made some changes to the tier list, with additional changes possibly to come:

- Nasir up to G-d tier (banned)

- Calill up from Mid to High, not factoring in Rexflame's existence (she's about as good without it, too)

- Lethe up from Low to Mid, as her combat potential has been demonstrated rather well in some Link Arena battles. Instant transformation and high speed before wings investments are her main advantages over other non-royal Laguz.

- Soren down from Mid back to Low. Elieson advocated his moving up earlier, but it does seem like sieging Generals is one of the most valued Sage utilities and Soren lacks the strength to pull it off. Not being able to wield Rexbolt is also a bummer. Tormod could well move up to Mid - he does support Mist in the cut supports after well, and there's enough booster for these two + Boyd.

Some other changes to think about and discuss:

- Geoffrey from Mid to High, as the only Paladin with a +atk support affinity granting him interesting advantages. Maybe not.

- Mist going down from High to Mid, due to draining resources without offering any reliability in return for the investment. Vantage builds fail so hard, and nobody depends on her enough to invest Nihil on such a fragile unit (easily 2HKO'd, or close to it, by things like supported Brave Axe Boyd even with many robes and shields invested).

- Lucia up from Low to Mid. Free Parity so you can have two (one Nihil user is now driven out of the meta), plus recovery with a very powerful Runesword attack, with chances to crit to boot and possible Renewal recovery. Maybe not though!

- The line between High and Mid tiers is generally hard to pinpoint. What has Largo, or Mia, got over Astrid or Ranulf for example? They're difficult to compare.

- Haar probably doesn't belong in Low, though honestly I don't really see any reason to put him over Jill unless you're also using Makalov without Parity so that you can capitalise by supporting him properly. 20 speed on average is too low for a pseudo-flying General with an arrow/Laguz weakness.

Also considering adding cut supports into analyses as an appendix. A separate thread about cut supports could be more useful, now that I think about it.

[Elieson]

Geoffrey is hard to place in mid because he needs the most investments in terms of str+speed, and his only support is elincia, who is a huge resource drain, or calill, who's practically nerfed beyond repir

Also valflame

Edited May 3, 2014 by Elieson

[Baldrick]

My thoughts.

Top tier: The two royals and Makalov up. Along with Ike, they can slot into any team without needing much in the way of synergy and take virtually no resources.

High tier: I'd put the Runesword users around the bottom of High. The SMs maybe above the laguz. Runesword is unreliable, but can turn the momentum of the match. Largo should be at most at the very bottom of High, personally I would move him down a tier but then I'd also move Boyd down a tier so take that how you will.

Mid tier: I'll split this into groups based on how good I think their niche is. Solid units that need a low amount of resources (Marcia, Jill, Astrid, Geoffrey), powerful units that need more resources (Lethe, Ranulf, Haar), second-tier Runesword users (Stefan, Tanith, Elincia, Lucia) and units probably too good for low tier (Titania, Tormod)

The other tiers are alright IMO.

[Espinosa]

@Elie

Geoffrey sorta compensates for that by being the only Paladin with a +atk affinity, and he does get to support Kieran and Brom in the cut supports meta (which I think we more or less agreed we'd be settling with). What's the Calill nerf, the 1 Nihil per team idea? I don't think there was any effort to introduce that rule (we just banned Nasir, which resolved all the Nihil and dragon related problems). So Calill still has an advantage over the rest of the Sages and is generally menacing to weakened units with low res.

@Baldrick

The units are (mostly) ordered according to in-game recruitment time within the same tier. It might be interesting to try to order them anyway, but I'm not sure if I'm ready! Seems like a tough task.

The Runesword users are mainly Elincia and Mist due to high mag, but some others (Ike, Marcia, Tanith, Lucia, Mia, lolOscar) are tolerable due to having other wanted qualities like better averages/caps or less stat booster reliance. Runesword's hit does make it very unreliable, no matter how threatening.

Boyd's definitely a Top Tier unit IMHO. Largo's not that bad when he's not being one-shot by VK and Sniper crits, and probably too strong to be pushed down a tier (we should totally resurrect the really old tradition of playing lower-tier metagames where things like Mia being in High makes more sense).

How do you draw the line between these four groups in Mid tier? And I'm not sure if Haar is significantly better than, say, Muarim, if we assume they both get the same number of Speedwings for instance.

[General Horace]

i'm with Baldrick on Boyd. He's super easy to kill without even worrying about him activating common abilities like Resolve and Wrath on him. I'd almost argue Largo is just as good because his defence blows so hard it's harder not to knock him below half health so he's actually somewhat threatening sometimes, and he has his own innate crit boost to counteract the possible brother bond. Largo's supports are nearly as good too, and it's not like Boyd is surviving sniper and Vague Katti crits that Largo isn't.

[Refa]

Zihark should move up some IMO (unless the one on the front page isn't the final one). Noone actually plans for their opponent to have a 30AS boomstick, he probably can wreck a good deal of people.

Edited May 6, 2014 by Refa

[Espinosa]

Boyd needs to be taking 20+ damage in order to die to a Vague Katti crit. The VK has 12+1 mt assuming Boyd has an axe equipped, so the difference between the attacker's atk and Boyd's defence should be 7 or greater. Boyd has 16 defence and can increase this to 20 if you give him both of your dracoshields (other units who lack Boyd's huge HP can take the robes instead). So it's 27 strength wielders of swords that OHKO Boyd, meaning Ike and all the Paladins cannot OHKO Boyd.

Largo has 13 defence, which isn't that much different, but he'll always be OHKO'd with the VK, even by Ike/Makalov/other Paladins who could be wielding it.

Largo also has a poorer support pool and lacks bows.

WRT Zihark:

Whom Zihark and other 30 AS units get to double:

- Generals (d'oh)

- Mist

- Neph

- Haar

- Boyd, Titania and Geoff who took only wings

- Kieran w/o any speed investment (shouldn't occur)

It's limited utility, but it's nice enough, and SMs existing is the sole reason some of these units will worry about having more than 25-26 AS.

[Elieson]

Largo has 13 defence, which isn't that much different, but he'll always be OHKO'd with the VK, even by Ike/Makalov/other Paladins who could be wielding it.

Largo also has a poorer support pool and lacks bows.

Largo's a risky and un 'Fixable potshot. Him not having bow access makes him slightly worse, and the beserker crit bonus still doesn't even give him 30 crit, meaning that he's generally facing ~close to~ single digit crits on opponents (far from reliable). Like sure, he's a solid AntIGeneral in that he hits like a truck and Brom's low luck leaves him susceptible to crits, but unless you give him Wrath (or Resolve), he's probably not scoring a critical hit.

I honestly think Boyd should drop down to top of High, at best. He really is easy to counter by nearly ANYBODY with sword access, and gets 2HKO'd by just so many things. His Brother support (+10Crit) is only really useful towards Rolf, since the way that every single game has turned out, Oscar never leads or faces early-match combat, so VK Oscar is made worse because of Boyd's unreliable and easy to pierce defense. Granted that Boyd's supports aren't a bad thing, he's just too shaky of a unit to deserve a place in the highest of tiers (ignoring G-D of course).

If we're considering the Nihil thing as moot, then Calill really should be up in top. Though teams get centralized around her, Valflame+Nihil+[sKILL] is an absolutely massive combo to work with. I'd put her in lower Top

[General Horace]

How often (if ever) has Boyd ran 20 defence? Dragon shields are always better on high defence units already. He's still killed with a silver sword + brave if he has an axe equipped anyway.

Largo supports Tauro which is pretty good for him since he needs like no resources, and gives And receives a critboost from Calill. Maurim can be made into a superlaguz, although his gauge does suck. Boyd has Brom and his bros I guess, but Mist and Titania are kind of lackluster, I forget if he has anyone in cut supports.

I'm not saying Largo is good or anything (I think he's horrible) but bulkier units are generally better.

Edited May 6, 2014 by General Horace

[Refa]

He can get +2DEF from his supports though. Considering he's usually the first to die, that actually does mean something.

[General Horace]

Parity and + attack supports aren't uncommon either.