Fire Emblem Heroes General Discussion and Links

[Othin]

29 minutes ago, Jotari said:

I'm 20 units away from that, most of them being newer units I haven't trained yet (I like to do that at the start of each month when there are actual quests in the training tower, though I've also recently trained one at a time in Forging Bonds). I just have six units on my back log of 2 drgaon flowers. I could do all their forging bonds now by just putting them to level 20 4* and completing them that way, but Forging Bonds is also a good indicator of what units I haven't hit 5* lv 40 yet, and I intend to get every unit in my barracks to that. So only 6 more units I actually have to collect feathers for for that.

I see you've done all the Tactics Drills too. I should get around to that some day as there are quite a few feathers to be gained. I like the idea of Tactics Drills, but I just find the solution to the Gran Master problems too esoteric to be fun to complete without the use of a move reset function (which I believe is one of those quality of life things actually in the subscription that us free to play players are needlessly denied).

I ended up just using PM1's videos for the Grandmaster ones.

The last thing I did was actually the Squad Assaults, which were mostly not too bad but got frustrating when losing later in a chain. Fortunately, Save skills can make most of them a lot more straightforward.

[Humanoid]

I've ignored Tactics Drills for years, but am fond of Game8's simple text-based instructions for each map, way more efficient to knock out a bunch at a time compared to loading up dozens of YouTube videos end-on-end and rewinding when you miss a crucial step.

[Othin]

19 minutes ago, Humanoid said:

I've ignored Tactics Drills for years, but am fond of Game8's simple text-based instructions for each map, way more efficient to knock out a bunch at a time compared to loading up dozens of YouTube videos end-on-end and rewinding when you miss a crucial step.

Ooh, that's neat.

[Ice Dragon]

On 11/25/2022 at 6:11 AM, Ice Dragon said:

I'm visiting family for Thanksgiving right now and have no motivation to type out a long post on mobile, so no analysis. But then it's not like Odin actually needs an analysis of how awful he is, even with the stat boost.

Now that I'm back home, it's time to do an analysis because I can.

 

Resplendent Odin with maximum Dragonflowers, +6 to all stats, and only his refined weapon equipped has 50/73/45/38+/38+.

Kliff with maximum Dragonflowers, +6 to Atk/Spd (I'm giving Odin 2 more stats because he has Atk/Spd Link on his weapon), and only his refined weapon equipped has 42-/64/57-/42-/42+ plus additional damage equal to 15% of the opponent's Atk, which comes out to at least 10 damage against most units (67 Atk or higher).

So a +10 Resplendent Odin is losing in Spd to a +0 Kliff and only barely scrapes by with higher Atk despite the fact that he has Litrblade on his weapon, and only if he doesn't have his Bonuses nullified.

 

And even if all you're going for is a Blarblade user, Miriel has 10 more Atk and 3 more Spd than Resplendent Odin.

 

On 11/25/2022 at 3:02 PM, Sunwoo said:

Honestly, that is the big issue here with Resplendent boosts and the dragonflowers. +5, +8, +10 boosts to stats in a vacuum is great in theory.

It's not that great in practice when all those points get distributed evenly to stats that don't need it. I'm sure my Reinhardt appreciates all those wasted defensive points that he really needs in attack. And Eirika sure wants more HP instead of attack and speed. Oh, and did we mention that Henry could really use more speed? And it kind of sucks since the characters who need the most help in stats also have the oldest and worst refines.

In that case, let's also move Fallen Edelgard's Dragonflower boosts from HP and Spd to Atk, Def, and Res. Or all of Ophelia's Dragonflower and Resplendent boosts to Atk (that's 35 points, by the way) because, like Reinhardt, she absolutely doesn't need any of her other stats.

There's no fair way to distribute these stats. A custom distribution will always be at the whims of the developers as to who to favor and by how much. An even distribution will always favor units that are already good. An uneven distribution calculated based on a unit's stats can have unintended consequences that also favor certain units over others (for example, fast armors have flatter stat distributions than other fast units by virtue of just having more stats, but they favor Spd boosts over all other stats just as much as any other fast unit does).

I would prefer that the Dragonflower and Resplendent boosts remain as they are and instead have refines do a second pass over older units, since that's an already existing mechanic that grants favor entirely at the whims of the developers.

[Jotari]

9 hours ago, Othin said:

I ended up just using PM1's videos for the Grandmaster ones.

The last thing I did was actually the Squad Assaults, which were mostly not too bad but got frustrating when losing later in a chain. Fortunately, Save skills can make most of them a lot more straightforward.

I've kept up to date, more or less with Squad Assaults. While they're not too hard, the whole losing a unit late in a challenge, when it happens, is really annoying. As, unlike other modes, you already have the first four maps done and you can do literally the exact same thing again. So being able to just spend stamina to retry a Squad Assault map without having to do the whole thing would be nice.

[XRay]

7 hours ago, Ice Dragon said:

There's no fair way to distribute these stats. A custom distribution will always be at the whims of the developers as to who to favor and by how much. An even distribution will always favor units that are already good. An uneven distribution calculated based on a unit's stats can have unintended consequences that also favor certain units over others (for example, fast armors have flatter stat distributions than other fast units by virtue of just having more stats, but they favor Spd boosts over all other stats just as much as any other fast unit does).

In D&D, there are a few ways to generate ability scores for your characters, and one is Point Buy. In Point Buy, each ability score from 8 to 13 costs 1 point, but if you want your score to go higher than 13, then the 14th and 15th point costs 2 point each.

Maybe Heroes can implement something similar, and players can opt for the old way where every stat gets distributed evenly, or they can choose to customize their stat distribution at the cost of having less total BST. For example, the first 5 points in each stat costs 1 Flower to increase, then the next 5 points cost 2 Flowers each to increase, then the next 5 costs 3, and so on.

Odin will still be at a disadvantage compared to other nukes, but at least he is not wasting stats on HP/Def/Res, so he can better tackle tanks.

[Ice Dragon]

10 minutes ago, XRay said:

Odin will still be at a disadvantage compared to other nukes, but at least he is not wasting stats on HP/Def/Res, so he can better tackle tanks.

And other nukes will do the exact same thing, which defeats the purpose.

Sure, older units will have more Dragonflower levels to use to boost stats, but the diminishing returns means that unless they already started only slightly behind, they're never actually going to catch up.

[Ice Dragon]

Probably not worth a separate thread, but (Legendary) Veronica's 1/7-scale figure is now officially open for pre-orders (with pre-orders closing in early March). She's pretty cute.

Good Smile's U.S. site has pre-orders for 188 USD, but only ships to the U.S. and Canada.

Good Smile's international site has pre-orders for 29,700 JPY. From my experience, if it's being billed in USD, it will have the same price as the U.S. site and the same price displayed during checkout, which means that even if the JPY's value increases before shipment, you'll still only pay 188 USD. I assume this is the case with any other currency.

Note that at current exchange rates, 29,700 JPY is about 210-220 USD. I have no idea why Good Smile is charging significantly less than that, but I won't complain.

The international site estimates shipping around February 2024, whereas the U.S. site estimates shipping around April 2024. The IS main site also lists February. No idea what's up with the discrepancy, but the long interval between pre-orders closing and shipping is pretty typical for larger figures like this (I think it used to be a bit shorter before the pandemic, but a year is pretty normal nowadays).

Good Smile won't charge you for the figure until about a week or two before the figure ships (so keep that in mind if you budget month by month or something like that), though I don't think they let you cancel your order if you change your mind.

 

Oh, and there's also a cute celebration illustration by Kozaki on the IS main site:

Is cute.

[Humanoid]

Pretty jarring when you see this and the Engage art back to back.

[Diovani Bressan]

With Legendary Robin being moved to February, and not being the 4th Hero for that month's remix, I am getting pretty sure that we will start to have 2 Remix Banners each time they happen.

Like... We get Remixes for Peony and Thrasir in February so Peony gets a banner of her own and Thrasir gets one for herself, for example.

[Othin]

1 hour ago, Diovani Bressan said:

With Legendary Robin being moved to February, and not being the 4th Hero for that month's remix, I am getting pretty sure that we will start to have 2 Remix Banners each time they happen.

Like... We get Remixes for Peony and Thrasir in February so Peony gets a banner of her own and Thrasir gets one for herself, for example.

Assuming they go that route (rather than one big banner), I wonder how they'll distribute the characters between the banners.

Wonder what to make of those main lineups. December will probably rerun the four CYL6 heroes, which means green and blue are open. February looks like a lock for colorless, and with the colorless New Heroes pool running low, January might be colorless as well. Even then, we'd need at least one old rerun if Rearmed Robin isn't going to show up super early. March looks probably red, and depending on how things go, April could be anything except green.

[Ice Dragon]

5 minutes ago, Othin said:

December will probably rerun the four CYL6 heroes, which means green and blue are open.

Assuming everything follows the same pattern as before, we'll be getting the new free story character at the start of the month and a new Legendary Hero at the end of the month, with both being on the banner, which means one of them will be blue and the other will be green.

We haven't had a green free story character yet, so I'm hoping we get one this time. However, Ninian being the most recently released returning unit means the new Legendary Hero has a slightly higher chance of taking that spot.

If the new Legendary Hero is blue, I'm guessing Finn. If I keep guessing him, I'll be right eventually. If green, then Sothe since he's the only remaining option for green before needing to dip into the non-main-character candidates (other than Robin and Corrin, who could only be green if they aren't using swords).

[Humanoid]

A half-hearted attempt at sniping red predictably resulted in only getting a merge for Nanna (plus another Ike BFF cat guy whose name I always forget, he's my most common 4-star special I suspect). Oh well, at least it's her first merge, so not awful for 40 orbs or whatever it was.

EDIT: Dammit, wrong thread, I'm so out of sorts today.

Edited November 30, 2022 by Humanoid

[Rinco]

Does anyone know if the issues with iOS16 were solved?

[Lemmy]

2 hours ago, Rinco said:

Does anyone know if the issues with iOS16 were solved?

I’m on 16.1.1 and game works fine for me, was there anything in particular you’d want me to test.

[Rinco]

57 minutes ago, Lemmy said:

I’m on 16.1.1 and game works fine for me, was there anything in particular you’d want me to test.

I was just afraid to update my iOS since they said there were issues with the game. 
It seems it's safe to update now. Thanks!

[Othin]

9 hours ago, Ice Dragon said:

Assuming everything follows the same pattern as before, we'll be getting the new free story character at the start of the month and a new Legendary Hero at the end of the month, with both being on the banner, which means one of them will be blue and the other will be green.

We haven't had a green free story character yet, so I'm hoping we get one this time. However, Ninian being the most recently released returning unit means the new Legendary Hero has a slightly higher chance of taking that spot.

If the new Legendary Hero is blue, I'm guessing Finn. If I keep guessing him, I'll be right eventually. If green, then Sothe since he's the only remaining option for green before needing to dip into the non-main-character candidates (other than Robin and Corrin, who could only be green if they aren't using swords).

That's certainly the default scenario, but I wonder if it'll hold up. The last time patterns pointed to a mythic on a New Heroes banner, we got regular Letizia instead. And now that the past three New Heroes banners have had both Ascended and Rearmed Heroes, one of them being an OC, it's possible that the start-of-book heroes will start following that pattern.

Speaking of changing patterns, I wonder if they'll move from one yearly multi-TT story to two. Perhaps we'll get a return to Book 4's story over the course of Jan-Apr, to fill half the Ascended/Rearmed slots on those banners.

[Diovani Bressan]

So we got the arena bonus units for the next Season and... Something is interesting here:

We have a question box in the place where we always get the Askr Trio, and there is no Askr Trio as bonus. What could that mean? Ascended Alfonse/Sharena as free hero maybe? Or maybe someone like... OG Veronica, being added as a 4th perma unit?

Edited December 3, 2022 by Diovani Bressan

[Sunwoo]

4 minutes ago, Diovani Bressan said:

So we got the arena bonus units for the next Season and... Something is interesting here:

We have a question box in the place where we always get the Askr Trio, and there is no Askr Trio as bonus. What could that mean? Ascended Alfonse/Sharena as free hero maybe? Or maybe someone like... OG Veronica, being added as a 4th perma unit?

Maybe it's Bruno, whom we do not talk about

[Diovani Bressan]

1 minute ago, Sunwoo said:

Maybe it's Bruno, whom we do not talk about

We don't talk about Bruno, but we can totally sing about Bruno.

Edited December 3, 2022 by Diovani Bressan

[Sunwoo]

2 minutes ago, Diovani Bressan said:

We don't talk about Bruno, but we can totally sing about Bruno.

Clearly FEH needs a big musical number of how no one in all of Askr or Embla talk about Bruno for a vast majority of the current story 😛

[Othin]

41 minutes ago, Diovani Bressan said:

So we got the arena bonus units for the next Season and... Something is interesting here:

We have a question box in the place where we always get the Askr Trio, and there is no Askr Trio as bonus. What could that mean? Ascended Alfonse/Sharena as free hero maybe? Or maybe someone like... OG Veronica, being added as a 4th perma unit?

Wasn't Fjorm in that slot's rotation for a while? Seems like it wouldn't be too weird to return to using the new book's OC for it, whoever they are.

[Ice Dragon]

1 hour ago, Diovani Bressan said:

So we got the arena bonus units for the next Season and... Something is interesting here:

We have a question box in the place where we always get the Askr Trio, and there is no Askr Trio as bonus. What could that mean? Ascended Alfonse/Sharena as free hero maybe? Or maybe someone like... OG Veronica, being added as a 4th perma unit?

Looks like it should be the next Book's freebie character since the next Book should be starting next week. The only oddity is that the New Heroes banner for the character starts a day after the start of the Arena season, though I doubt that's actually a problem.

[Diovani Bressan]

6 hours ago, Othin said:

Wasn't Fjorm in that slot's rotation for a while? Seems like it wouldn't be too weird to return to using the new book's OC for it, whoever they are.

 

5 hours ago, Ice Dragon said:

Looks like it should be the next Book's freebie character since the next Book should be starting next week. The only oddity is that the New Heroes banner for the character starts a day after the start of the Arena season, though I doubt that's actually a problem.

I still think it's weird because all these years when the free hero was added and appeared in the Arena Bonus units selection for the first time, one of the Askr Trio was also there as well and not removed to have them (even Fjorm, she didnt take the Askr Trio slot at first).

[Othin]

3 hours ago, Diovani Bressan said:

 

I still think it's weird because all these years when the free hero was added and appeared in the Arena Bonus units selection for the first time, one of the Askr Trio was also there as well and not removed to have them (even Fjorm, she didnt take the Askr Trio slot at first).

https://feheroes.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Arena_bonus_Heroes

According to this list, Fjorm took the Askr slot in seasons 51-52, 62-63, 70-71, 79-80, 87-89, 97-99, and 106-107. Those seasons span from January 2018 to February 2019.

So it's true that Fjorm's first appearance wasn't in the Askr slot - but it was in what became the legendary slot, and this time we already have two units there. I don't think it's too strange to shift around the order here, there's still precedent for non-core characters appearing in that slot.