Haven't played since 2019. What's changed?

[Xenovia]

Back in the day I had an all-Camilla team and made it to T20 once in a while. I ragequit after failing to get Legendary Azura with 300 orbs. What's happened since?

[Humanoid]

I'm only just temporarily back for a few weeks after about a year off, so my knowledge has a fair few gaps in it, but I am trying to play fairly seriously so I can get a proper big picture on how the game has improved and/or regressed since I last played.

One thing perhaps particularly relevant for you is that you can "spark" for Legendary Azura right now so you're guaranteed to get her if you have 155 orbs. Sparking (not the official term for FEH but convenient) is the now relatively established mechanic where on certain banners, you get to pick one of the focus units for free after 40 summons (thus 155, being 20 orbs times 8 sessions, minus 5 for the free first pull). There's about a week left on the banner if you want to do that. Bonus is that she's just been upgraded as part of the ongoing "remix" they're doing on old Legendary/Mythic heroes that adds/upgrades their skills to keep them relevant in this powercreeped world.

Speaking of that mechanic, there's been a subscription model called FEH Pass added a while ago - early 2020 apparently - you might have already heard of it, and naturally it's pretty controversial and they've been adding new perks to it over time. For about $10 per month the main selling points are you get two "Resplendent" heroes per month, and the ability to use the "spark" mechanic mentioned above on a bigger range of banners. Resplendents are old units like the OG Eliwood and Cordelia upgraded with +2 to all stats and new art/voices. The addition of the extra sparking is pretty recent, previously you couldn't do it at all on Seasonal, Hero Fest or Legendary banners, now subscribers can.

Other than that, eh, they've obviously added a bunch of game modes, none of which have really captured the imagination. Most recent is the real-time PvP mode "Summoner Duels" which has proved pretty divisive.

Of the ease of use changes, the biggest has by far been the Reserves, where you can store your spare units non-destructively (unlike combat manuals). 1000 extra slots for units right there. That's not to discount the convenience of a filter finally being added to the barracks too so finding that one unit halfway down isn't nearly as painful anymore.

Most relevant new currencies: Trait Fruits, which add the ability to change the nature of a unit; Forma Souls, which let you claim one of the Hall of Forms units to use for reals; Divine Codes, which let you buy combat manuals from a predetermined pool of available ones; Ascendant Floret, which lets you add an additional asset to one of your units.

EDIT: Oh, and in terms of actual gameplay itself, the biggest gamechangers have been the addition of the Canto and Save skills which are both fairly meta-defining.

EDIT2: You're allowed to lose a match during your arena run too these days, which is an unexpected kindness.

Edited March 15, 2022 by Humanoid

[Xenomata]

Adding on to the above:

• What Humanoid said about Feh Pass is partially true. It is possible to actually get three Resplendent Heroes in a single subscription period, though it seems there's some timing needed to do it. Otherwise Feh Pass offers a number of small novelties that most players probably don't notice, but also the ability to have your units autobattle through maps automatically until all stamina has been depleted, which is arguably just as notable.
  In addition, the Resplendent Heroes are gifted out to subscribers as a neutral 5* freebie, and if you remain subbed to Feh Pass for long enough you get additional perks... which I would be glad to tell you what they are if I could be arsed to actually check what they were! Yeah I don't exactly sub to Feh Pass for long...
• What Humanoid said about Sparking is also partially true. Specifically, New Hero banners have Sparking available to all players, meaning you can get one of the new heroes for free every month if you summon all 40 times needed. Among the banners that feature the Sparking feature to Feh Pass subbers are Seasonal banners, Legendary and Mythic Hero banners, Double Special Hero banners which bring back 2 seasonal heroes per color to be the sole 5* focuses, among some others. Notable as well is that the last few Brave Hero banners since the addition of Sparking have allowed for players to spark 4 times, once for each Brave Hero... but of course that happens once every 40 summons, so you'd be looking at 160 total summons just to spark all 4 Brave Heroes.
  Keep in mind that any summon performed in a banner will count towards the total number of heroes summoned, including heroes summoned via Free Summon tickets, so if aiming for a Spark it is good to remember to use as many of those as possible before hitting the 40-summon mark.
  Also noteworthy is the Celestial Stone shop, which is directly linked to sparkings. For each spark you perform, you get one Celestial Stone to be used in the shop. It's not much, but it does offer some nifty resources.
• Forma Souls are offered at the price of $29.99usd for a bundle released around every Hall of Forms event (the Forma Soul bundle includes 60 orbs and one Forma Soul to use), and one is offered for purchase in the above mentioned Celestial Stone shop.
• I don't necessarily think Canto and Save skills are all that notable to be honest. Yes they have become mainstays in pretty much every single unit able to access them, but they do not actually alter the gameplay of FEH that much. The game can really only add skills to change up how the player gets from point A to point B, but point A and point B have remained the same: start with 4 blokes and kill all the buttheads, respectively.

As for some things that might be worth going over:

• The powercreep is very real. Even all the weapon refines and Legendary/Mythic remixes can only do so much to older units when new units come loaded down with effects and skills meant to work perfectly in sync with the unit themself,, or even in the case of 4* demotes just having plainly better stats than the rest (Cath, one of the newest additions to the 4* pool, can rock 47 Spd with an asset in it). New refines tend to push old units from being meh to absolutely amazing (Libra wasn't much of anything to speak of, but now he boasts a good mix of damage and bulk, and oh my god have you seen Walhart?), leaving anyone who got an early refine... they aren't even in the dust, they ARE the dust.
• Speaking more of powercreep, passives have been getting loaded down with Tier 4 upgrades. I don't quite remember when the first Tier 4s were released, but by now there's little reason to be using most of the Tier 3 alternatives if you can access the Tier 4 variant, even if the upgrade is small for the cost of getting the skill. Even Distant Counter/Close Counter have upgraded variants now.
• Remember how I said the powercreep is real? Well, if you intend to start playing seriously, you may want to keep an eye out for a unit called Edelgard: Hegemon Husk, who I personally refer to as Hegemon for differentiating sake. Seriously, there are strong units and units who are hard to kill... Hegemon is both. You will learn to hate Hegemon, and then you will probably ask around for how to deal with her, and then you will learn that she's weak to Firesweep+Poison Strike or Boey, and then you will build a few of those units, and then you will just be mildly annoyed by Hegemon.
  Generally Fallen units are pretty strong... but Hegemon was a direct repeat of what Reinhardt did to the meta back in his day.
• Sorry to say it, but really the only versions of Camilla that matter now are her Brave and Adrift alts, maybe also her Hot Spring alt if you care about grail units. Brave Camilla has access to a wide-reaching Def/Res debuff in addition to solid attacking stats, and Adrift Camilla is raw power if handled right. Both, of course, require their weapons to be refined.
• Powercreep is real... but so are the freaking text boxes. Hell, the recent Spring Delthea's skills text boxes take up so much room that she needed two pages to show all of her skills in the reveal trailer.
• Not saying anything about the existence of this thread, but further inquiries about mechanics you don't understand may best be left to the Questions and Answers thread. There is seriously a problem with some people just completely ignoring the existence of the pinned threads to make entirely new threads asking simple questions like how to inherit skills or showing off their Priscilla... that was a weird one.

...seriously though fuck Hegemon. Boey was never on my +10 radar, and yet I still felt I needed to have him built as best as possible just to be able to deal with her, and now it's so easy for me to kill Hegemon that all the resources used on Boey feel wasted...

Edited March 15, 2022 by Xenomata

[Ice Dragon]

12 hours ago, Xenomata said:

It is possible to actually get three Resplendent Heroes in a single subscription period, though it seems there's some timing needed to do it.

There's no real timing needed to get three. One month will always overlap three Resplendent Hero releases as long as you don't start your one month subscription on the exact day of the reset, though it's recommended to subscribe close to the middle of a release period so that you have time to finish all three sets of quests for rewards.

Releases are from the 10th to the 24th of the month and from the 25th of the month to the 9th of the next month, so it's best to start a subscription either between the 15-20th of the month or 1-5th of the month to give yourself time to finish the quests.

[Xenomata]

9 minutes ago, Ice Dragon said:

There's no real timing needed to get three. One month will always overlap three Resplendent Hero releases as long as you don't start your one month subscription on the exact day of the reset, though it's recommended to subscribe close to the middle of a release period so that you have time to finish all three sets of quests for rewards.

It might just be more notable to me now since the time that I used to spend playing Feh is now being spent either working or resting because work was a slog.
It is, however, pretty hard to miss all 3 Resplendent heroes as long as you just open the game real quick. It's the quests that one is more likely to miss... which honestly the only ones worth doing IMO are the orbs and Divine Dew ones.

Edited March 15, 2022 by Xenomata

[Humanoid]

Working from home during lockdown instead of in the office was a reasonably big contributor in my quitting, heh. In the office there's not a lot of options to distract myself for 5-10 minutes other than mobile gaming, but at home the sky's the limit. Transitioning back to a 50-50 sort of arrangement fairly soon though.

Now, I had some 2000-odd 15x15 Picross puzzles to do which had already somewhat taken over from FEH before that, but now I've blasted through all of them, so until I find a different Picross app, that avenue of time-wasting is dead now. There's all the 20x20 puzzles left but that's unplayable on a phone screen, especially with my narrow 21:9 phone. Bought a Chromebook just specifically to play those at home though.

Oh god I'm rambling. Uh, FEH changes right? Oh I know, you can customise Kiran now, use them as a combat unit a few different modes, and most importantly change their appearance. And actually I only just found out today (while looking through all the lances in the game for Brave functionality) you can now even change their weapon to any of the core melee or tome colours.

Another small change but one I like is that Legendaries that give stat boosts are back since last month, now on top of the Pair-up capability instead of being an either-or. That's cool, never liked that the pairing system wiped out most of the benefits of blessings when it came to team building.

EDIT: Boy, looking through the menus just made me realise that Bowlyn is still my summoner support despite my not even remembering the last time I fielded her. Probably time I updated that, huh?

Edited March 16, 2022 by Humanoid

[Othin]

16 hours ago, Ice Dragon said:

There's no real timing needed to get three. One month will always overlap three Resplendent Hero releases as long as you don't start your one month subscription on the exact day of the reset, though it's recommended to subscribe close to the middle of a release period so that you have time to finish all three sets of quests for rewards.

Releases are from the 10th to the 24th of the month and from the 25th of the month to the 9th of the next month, so it's best to start a subscription either between the 15-20th of the month or 1-5th of the month to give yourself time to finish the quests.

Now that Feh Pass also affects sparks, it seems like a good idea to try to time any one-off subscriptions to make the most of those as well. In particular, 1-5th range should allow for two legendary/mythic sparks if you have the orbs for it. Seasonal sparks are a bit more chaotic, but they're also long enough to be easy to line up with.

[Humanoid]

Thought it'd be interesting to pick which run of three consecutive Resplendents I'd most want if I had ever theoretically subbed to Feh Pass previously. Assuming the order they're listed on the official site is chronologically correct, I think I'd go with the Raven, Sonya, Tailtiu run, which incidentally are all new to me having been released fairly recently. Though the downside of that I suppose is that I'm getting only one 5-star exclusive unit instead of two.

[Xenomata]

3 hours ago, Humanoid said:

Thought it'd be interesting to pick which run of three consecutive Resplendents I'd most want if I had ever theoretically subbed to Feh Pass previously. Assuming the order they're listed on the official site is chronologically correct, I think I'd go with the Raven, Sonya, Tailtiu run, which incidentally are all new to me having been released fairly recently. Though the downside of that I suppose is that I'm getting only one 5-star exclusive unit instead of two.

Actually those are all past Resplendents who will not be run again (as far as we know).
The current Resplendent Hero is Seliph, and will be followed by Ophelia, with the third being currently unknown.

If you want any past Resplendents, you will need to give up $4.99usd for one past Resp units outfit and 5* copy.

[Humanoid]

4 hours ago, Xenomata said:

Actually those are all past Resplendents who will not be run again (as far as we know).
The current Resplendent Hero is Seliph, and will be followed by Ophelia, with the third being currently unknown.

If you want any past Resplendents, you will need to give up $4.99usd for one past Resp units outfit and 5* copy.

Yeah, I know how it works, just commenting on what the ideal one-month period for me to have been subscribed would have been with the power of hindsight.