Event Calendar (Dec 2022 - Jan 2023)

[Othin]

As usual, days are effectively off by one: the events will start at 11 pm Pacific time on the day listed.

Looks like we're getting three seasonal banners in a row, probably to make room for an Engage banner in late January.

[Mercakete]

Ah, so we'll finally be getting a new seasonal banner on thursday! I guess we'll get a banner trailer today or tomorrow, then. Can't wait to see the new designs, but I'm much more excited to see what the New Years banner will be like!

[Othin]

3 hours ago, Mercakete said:

Ah, so we'll finally be getting a new seasonal banner on thursday! I guess we'll get a banner trailer today or tomorrow, then. Can't wait to see the new designs, but I'm much more excited to see what the New Years banner will be like!

Not quite. The banner is Friday since it's off by a day, and it looks like the TT banner will start Thursday. Usually, seasonal trailers go up the night before the TT banner, which suggests the trailer Wednesday night and the silhouettes Tuesday night.

[LoneStar]

Wow 3 back-to-back seasonal banners! Well they have been doing that for the last couple of years, but it's crazy seeing it written out. I suspecting characters that I like may be on the upcoming Christmas banner. Like Annette or Marianne due to previous patterns.

I going to have to skip most of the upcoming banners, including the Engage one. Obviously I don't really have any attachment to those characters yet. And I need to get merges on Peony, because I'm somehow a competitive AR player with Mythics that are just +1 or +2.

Right, and there will be Tempest Trials accompanying the seasonals. They usually give good sacred seals around this time. So I'm looking forward to Atk/Spd Catch and Ideal.

[Mercakete]

1 hour ago, Othin said:

Not quite. The banner is Friday since it's off by a day, and it looks like the TT banner will start Thursday. Usually, seasonal trailers go up the night before the TT banner, which suggests the trailer Wednesday night and the silhouettes Tuesday night.

Thanks for the correction! Looking forward to seeing what these new silhouettes look like! ^_^

[Othin]

23 minutes ago, LoneStar said:

Wow 3 back-to-back seasonal banners! Well they have been doing that for the last couple of years, but it's crazy seeing it written out. I suspecting characters that I like may be on the upcoming Christmas banner. Like Annette or Marianne due to previous patterns.

I going to have to skip most of the upcoming banners, including the Engage one. Obviously I don't really have any attachment to those characters yet. And I need to get merges on Peony, because I'm somehow a competitive AR player with Mythics that are just +1 or +2.

Right, and there will be Tempest Trials accompanying the seasonals. They usually give good sacred seals around this time. So I'm looking forward to Atk/Spd Catch and Ideal.

Technically, I believe this is the first time we're getting three back-to-back. Previous January seasonals, on years that had them, were always later in the month, so we'd get two seasonals for winter+NY, followed by one New Heroes, then two more seasonals.

If you're competitive without merges, do you need them?

More Atk/Spd seals would be nice, although with three TTs in a row I hope some of them have seals with only one or two levels so there isn't as much of a strain on coin supply.

[LoneStar]

38 minutes ago, Othin said:

If you're competitive without merges, do you need them?

I've been maintaining tier 38 mostly fine, and when I drop it's for reasons out side of performance. So I don't need the merges, but the extra wiggle room is nice to have. Especially when I don't feel like pulling for every defense Mythic, and those -60s add up.

[Humanoid]

Hmm, looking at last year's rewards (for which I wasn't around for), it seems we got:

3x December Legendary banner tickets
3x Previous Year Winter banner tickets
3x Two years prior Winter banner tickets
5x Current year NY banner tickets
10x Combined two previous years NY double special banner tickets

So for this year that'd be:
3x ???
3x Artur, Lysithea, Manuela, Mirabilis
3x Hilda, Sephiran, Bernadetta, Altina
5x ???
10x Peony, Plumeria, Kaden, Velouria, Dagr, Lyre, Reginn, Fafnir

 

Not much in it for me besides the freebies, my main motivation right now is Rearmed heroes to build up common heroes because the traditional gameplay loop of getting one-off copies of powerful new heroes isn't all that interesting to me anymore. They may be great units but unless they're class-definingly so (e.g. Summer Edelgard, Horse Azura), it just ends with them being forgotten in the barracks alongside all the other unmerged heroes with bad natures.

Dunno if I hold Rearmed heroes in more esteem than the average player. Until they were introduced I literally did not care about the kit of any fancy new units that I summoned, it was simply a matter of giving them Reposition and then levelling them up. After the event you could ask me what skills they had and I'd have no idea. Rearmed heroes made me look at and actually plan skill inheritance for the first time in years.

[Othin]

17 minutes ago, Humanoid said:

Hmm, looking at last year's rewards (for which I wasn't around for), it seems we got:

3x December Legendary banner tickets
3x Previous Year Winter banner tickets
3x Two years prior Winter banner tickets
5x Current year NY banner tickets
10x Combined two previous years NY double special banner tickets

So for this year that'd be:
3x ???
3x Artur, Lysithea, Manuela, Mirabilis
3x Hilda, Sephiran, Bernadetta, Altina
5x ???
10x Peony, Plumeria, Kaden, Velouria, Dagr, Lyre, Reginn, Fafnir

 

Not much in it for me besides the freebies, my main motivation right now is Rearmed heroes to build up common heroes because the traditional gameplay loop of getting one-off copies of powerful new heroes isn't all that interesting to me anymore. They may be great units but unless they're class-definingly so (e.g. Summer Edelgard, Horse Azura), it just ends with them being forgotten in the barracks alongside all the other unmerged heroes with bad natures.

Dunno if I hold Rearmed heroes in more esteem than the average player. Until they were introduced I literally did not care about the kit of any fancy new units that I summoned, it was simply a matter of giving them Reposition and then levelling them up. After the event you could ask me what skills they had and I'd have no idea. Rearmed heroes made me look at and actually plan skill inheritance for the first time in years.

Now that you mention it - what are the NY banners going to be, anyway?

I see revival banners listed for Happy New Year, New Year's of Fire and Ice, and Renewed Spirit, which were the first three NY banners. But Renewed Spirit hasn't actually ever gotten a normal rerun before - the past two years, it was folded into the Duo Peony banner for an 8-character banner. So it looks like that pair is finally separating, but there's no sign of the Duo Peony banner, or last year's Like Clockwork banner. Will we get another pair of Like Clockwork and the new banner? If so, where will the Duo Peony characters go? The NY TT banner probably only has three slots, and the Voting Gauntlet looks too early.

They could do one big NY banner with all three years' worth of characters, but that sounds like a bit much. Raising the rate to 8% would still mean the individual characters would be below normal frequency, and 4* focus characters have had bad rates on Double Special banners because they wouldn't raise the 4* rate accordingly.

Edited December 11, 2022 by Othin

[Humanoid]

Ah yeah, I guess there's a missing banner from the calendar either way you slice it. Either one with a combined 2021/2022 (Peony/Dagr) lineup, or 2021 (Peony) alone, depending on how the new one is sold. I suppose they can hide whatever they want under the "New Year's Celebration!" meta-event but still, looking back to last year's calendar, all years were present and accounted for.

*flashbacks to 2017 when they just published calendars randomly*

[Sunwoo]

Would it kill them to just ... not have a seasonal banner every month, like how they used to.

[Othin]

After counting up the units in the main 5* pool, maybe I don't really care if they do more of the "w Special Heroes" style merged banners, at least for my own barracks. I'm only missing 2/28 blues, 3/23 greens, and 2/20 colorless, so the main 5* pool isn't going to do much for me outside of red (8/29).

[Mercakete]

13 hours ago, Sunwoo said:

Would it kill them to just ... not have a seasonal banner every month, like how they used to.

Some of us look forward to those every month you know.

[Sunwoo]

12 hours ago, Mercakete said:

Some of us look forward to those every month you know.

And some of us looked forward to actually having more New Heroes banners instead of 50% of the year's newly released units being seasonal-locked.

Your point?

[Tybrosion]

We're at the bottom of the barrel for most games in regards to New Hero banner candidates at this point. Between that and the incoming Engage spam, I don't think we were ever going to see an increase in New Hero banners regardless of what they do with Special Hero banners.

If anything, there'll probably be multiple games that don't get a New Heroes banner during Book VII's run.

[Othin]

39 minutes ago, Tybrosion said:

We're at the bottom of the barrel for most games in regards to New Hero banner candidates at this point. Between that and the incoming Engage spam, I don't think we were ever going to see an increase in New Hero banners regardless of what they do with Special Hero banners.

If anything, there'll probably be multiple games that don't get a New Heroes banner during Book VII's run.

FE2 and FE13 are the games that have run lowest, and they still showed up on the regular rotation this past year. I don't think they're going anywhere until they run out completely, and I don't see a reason to expect other games to fall off the rotation first. Even FE5 has settled into a consistent pattern.

Now, if Book 7 gets two Engage banners, a Fallen banner, and a CYL banner out of the now-usual 12 total, that only leaves 8 other New Heroes banners. (Including the Fates one we just got.) So simple numbers suggest that there have to be a few games left out, but that has nothing to do with characters available.

[Sunwoo]

54 minutes ago, Tybrosion said:

We're at the bottom of the barrel for most games in regards to New Hero banner candidates at this point. Between that and the incoming Engage spam, I don't think we were ever going to see an increase in New Hero banners regardless of what they do with Special Hero banners.

If anything, there'll probably be multiple games that don't get a New Heroes banner during Book VII's run.

I know. I'm just irritated that every year we seem to lose more potential new heroes that could be added. First to more special heroes banners and three-unit banners, then to Ascended and Rearmed units from the same game counting as a "new" unit. Even "bottom of the barrel" banner stuff is a character someone's waiting for, whom they could make marketable with good skills, and the way they keep on sticking Tellius into one New Hero slot so that its cast in the actual game is so freaking low is just insane. Not to mention Archanea and Thracia also missing huge chunks of its cast.

Heck, they've held out on the obvious "remaining gen 2 Awakening kids" banner for so long that there's a good chance they'll have Ascended Lucina, demote Noire or Laurent, one of Inigo or Selena being a 5-star, and Rearmed m!Grima. And somehow I doubt fans of regular Inigo and Selena will be psyched about waiting that long for their base version. Worse, they could make one of Selena or Inigo a demote and leave the less popular Noire and Laurent out. And even in the case where one of the Ascended or Rearmed is an OC so one of Noire or Laurent becomes an instademote, it still means one Awakening kid got left out in the cold.

Edited December 13, 2022 by Sunwoo

[Humanoid]

45 minutes ago, Sunwoo said:

Rearmed m!Grima

With breath weapon inheritance rules I wouldn't expect more than one Rearmed dragon a year, so it seems unlikely that dragon will be an Awakening dragon again, let alone the same Awakening dragon as the previous one.

I wonder if they'll ever do Rearmed Beasts. If they did it'd round out the inheritable weapon types to a tidy dozen, and we'd have a convenient annual rotation of Rearmed weapons. Three melee weapons, staves, four tome colours, bows, daggers, breaths, beasts.

[Sunwoo]

36 minutes ago, Humanoid said:

With breath weapon inheritance rules I wouldn't expect more than one Rearmed dragon a year, so it seems unlikely that dragon will be an Awakening dragon again, let alone the same Awakening dragon as the previous one.

I mean, it might as well be a year by the time the next Awakening banner rolls out and they might've gone through all or most of the other weapons by then. I, uh, also wouldn't put it past them to put in a Rearmed male Grima because they had the female one. Like, just look at them doubling up on ninja male and female Corrin, Halloween female and male Robin on two consecutive years, Halloween male and female Corrin in the same year ...

Wouldn't surprise me at this rate.

[Jave]

The only playable characters from Awakening left to be released are Vaike, Laurent and that other guy Kellam. So I could see Vaike and Kellam getting released alongside a Rearmed and Ascended unit in a New Heroes banner, and if they care about completing the cast, they may toss Laurent as a direct 3*/4* unit or release him in a mixed Seasonal Banner. (Although I stand by what I've been saying for years: Kellam should be released without announcement, without a banner, without fanfare, nothing. Just reset the game one day and he's there. You don't even get a notice you got him, he just appears and tells you he's been there since Day 1. Bonus points if he has Book 1 stats and skills.)

Archaneia and Fates are likely not getting a banner in a while given their recent ones. Thracia and Tellius still have plenty of waifu material to warrant several banners so I think we'll see plenty of them in Book 7. Valentia and Magvel are running low on characters so we may not see them outside of seasonals.

Engage is for sure getting at least two New Heroes banners, in addition to at least two Seasonal banners (and one of them being 100% Summer Banner).

[Fire Emblem Fan]

I'm ready to be disappointed by those Special Heroes banners. All three of them. My hope if Christmas Brom will be dashed again, New Year won't give us Caineghis, and January will switch out the theme rather than go with Elibe's desert.

Anyway, I think Engage is very likely getting two New Heroes banners in Book 7. Assuming that, plus adding the Fates one we just had, CYL, and Fallen, then we have seven more chapters left in Book 7. I'd predict that Archanea and Awakening miss out, and I feel Valentia might as well, leaving us with Tellius (probably giving us Lucia), Blazing Blade (Isadora), Binding Blade (Elen), Sacred Stones (Vanessa), Genealogy (Brigid), Thracia (Linoan), and Three Houses (Felix...I mean, Dorothea).

[Tybrosion]

Honestly, I can't see Engage getting less than three banners within the next year (maybe even four). I don't think that possibility is that outlandish given that Valentia got four banners (with two of them running concurrently with each other) in 2017.

[Humanoid]

Hopefully each of those banners will have Rearmed OCs then. 😛

[Othin]

1 hour ago, Tybrosion said:

Honestly, I can't see Engage getting less than three banners within the next year (maybe even four). I don't think that possibility is that outlandish given that Valentia got four banners (with two of them running concurrently with each other) in 2017.

Shadows of Valentia and Three Houses suggest the pattern is three banner slots in the first year - two close to release, and one later. Alm's Army and Celica's Army don't really count as separate.

1 hour ago, Humanoid said:

Hopefully each of those banners will have Rearmed OCs then. 😛

We still don't even know if that's relevant. It's possible that banners without an insta-demote will follow the Fates banner in having only one Ascended/Rearmed to still have four regular units, and also possible that early Engage banners will have special rules to help it get its cast in place.

[Humanoid]

1 hour ago, Othin said:

It's possible that banners without an insta-demote will follow the Fates banner in having only one Ascended/Rearmed to still have four regular units, and also possible that early Engage banners will have special rules to help it get its cast in place.

Yeah, I fear the potential of there being special rules that reduce the value of the banner for people not specifically interested in the Engage characters as characters. The Fates banner wouldn't be the template though, as it still was being carried by two special unit types to sell it, even if I personally would prefer an Ascended unit over a Mythic.