lunatic pairings

[Alysius]

ok so i want to do a new lunatic run, and i have been making a list on some potential pairings for maxium over powerness. right now i wish to make a team of at least 12 good units for solo'ing and supporting.

so that would be at least 6 pairs at least. right now i have these

chrom x olivia 2

mu x nowi 2

donnel x sully 2

gaius x 1

maribelle x lon'qu 2

what i want is a good healer that can also withstand a few attacks, can be male or female. im thinking of maribelle for now. i also want a speedy unit that can dodge everything and go for chests i dont have the keys for such as gaius with someone else. and also a over powered mage that can take care of those pesky long range units so my melee characters can live. im thinking of tharja but im not sure. and then that leaves one pair left for my team.

what do you guys think?

[Czar_Yoshi]

First off, that's way too big. Increasing your team size in general will always make Lunatic harder, and even very good players start seeing big setbacks when going above five pairs at any time. If you want "maximum overpoweredness", the only way to go is Chrom x +Def Avatar and bench everyone else.

Chrom x Olivia: This pays off if you're willing to do a lot of dance spamming and subsequent exp funneling to get Olivia as strong as possible by Cht.13 so their kids get decent bases and skills. EXP funneling doesn't work so well with a large team, though, so you'll need to take care not to have everyone else fall behind.

Avatar x Nowi: The faster you get Nowi off the ground, the better they are. Make sure to buy her a Spotpass Dragonstone+, save her a Seraph Robe or two, and have lots of tonics (and maybe a Tiki's Tear) on hand, and have Avatar a high leveled Merc when you get her for optimal training.

Donnel x Sully: Donnel is a bad unit. He has to go through E weapons twice no matter what you do, requires an extremely rare and valuable Second Seal (which is even more important if you're using a large team), and once your other units start capping their stats, he falls off hard due to having mostly negative stat modifiers and a limited reclass set to keep picking up skills from. Essentially, he's a liability early on and late on, and performs well in the middle of the game. Here's the problem with that: Lunatic is very difficult early on, since your units all start behind the curve and you have to do a lot of work catching up. It then gets much easier during the middle (Cht.7-11) because enemies grow much slower than your units and haven't started promoting or getting forges yet. Once promoted enemies start coming in, and especially once you start capping stats and the enemies start catching back up to you, the mode becomes much harder since you're no longer far ahead of the curve. So Donnel is essentially terrible when the game is hard, and good when it's easy- exactly the opposite of what you'd want in a unit.

Gaius: Being able to dodge everything through Spd alone is a pretty tall order. The game's Avo formula gives 3 Avo for every 2 Spd you have, so a unit who's 10 Spd ahead of all your others- which is quite a bit early on- is only going to have 15 Avo on everyone else, which is nice but not enough to be invincible. Actually dodging reliably involves using everything there is- +Avo skills, C+ supports, advantageous terrain, WTA, and high Spd. At the least, he'll need a very good support to do that job, but he'll still never be 100% untouchable and with his poor HP and Def won't be able to take more than one hit for the majority of the game without a lot of investment (and frankly, the game offers much better sword users like Gregor and Stahl if you really want to use one for dodging Axes). Lategame, all the enemies will be packing Hit+20 and weapons forged with +20 Hit, so dodgetanking without a Breaker is pretty much impossible. For chest utility, Anna is your best friend and can generally take a hit with little investment until very lategame.

Maribelle x Lon'qu: "Withstand a few hits" isn't something you can just ask a unit to do when you're looking at 25+ mt attacks before you can even choose who to field. Lunatic generally demands that you have a good tank with plenty of investment (or Frederick) to take more than one hit, Maribelle is one of the frailest units in the game and you're not even giving her a +Def support so odds are she'll be getting OHKOed by most everything all the way through. Switching to Lissa with a +Def support is one option, since Lissa has a lot of availability on Maribelle and generally better physical growths so she can take a hit sometimes- also a decent chance of having supports with Fred. Libra and Anna are both fairly bulky prepromotes who can take two or three hits before going down, but they come a bit late. What I usually do is rely on Lissa early on, add in the prepromotes as auxiliary healers with Lissa still as my main when I get them, and reclass Sumia and Cordelia to Falcos around Cht.18 when my children really get going. Those five hold down staff duty pretty nicely for the rest of the game. In general though, no matter who you use learning to keep your healers out of range will do more good than any long-term team planning.

Tharja: She has big issues early on with getting critted, has no real magical reclassing options once she hits 20/20, comes fairly late and has no way of hitting and running without Rescue (what you seem to want her for). If you need a non-Avatar/child magical unit, Miriel is much better: she has four promoted Tome classes, comes very early with good training opportunities in Cht.3, 5 and 6, and gives one of the best children in the game.