Post-Maddening Debrief

[Skyteppelin]

Do you have any thoughts on Lapis or did you not really use her?

[hdawgsizzle]

2 minutes ago, Skyteppelin said:

Do you have any thoughts on Lapis or did you not really use her?

Not really anything concrete based on my own experience. Every playthrough I've seen where someone has tried to use her she's been a liability and the person playing concludes that she's bad, so unless someone else has something substantial, I'm inclined to believe that. Her bases and growths are pretty uninspiring. 55% spd's nice but 5 base build on a 5% build growth? Yikes. Her str base and growth aren't good and that can be a hard stat to patch up. Eirika exists but a lot of units want her

Oddly, more than any other unit in this game, more than Yunaka or Ivy or anyone, I have been absolutely bombarded with "THE LAPIS EXPERIENCE" youtube videos. All of them are just her hitting a single 30% crit with a Killing Edge, so I don't really get it. She smashes that one enemy off of an avoid tile in her join chapter and that's kinda cool I guess? 

[Skyteppelin]

51 minutes ago, hdawgsizzle said:

Not really anything concrete based on my own experience. Every playthrough I've seen where someone has tried to use her she's been a liability and the person playing concludes that she's bad, so unless someone else has something substantial, I'm inclined to believe that. Her bases and growths are pretty uninspiring. 55% spd's nice but 5 base build on a 5% build growth? Yikes. Her str base and growth aren't good and that can be a hard stat to patch up. Eirika exists but a lot of units want her

Oddly, more than any other unit in this game, more than Yunaka or Ivy or anyone, I have been absolutely bombarded with "THE LAPIS EXPERIENCE" youtube videos. All of them are just her hitting a single 30% crit with a Killing Edge, so I don't really get it. She smashes that one enemy off of an avoid tile in her join chapter and that's kinda cool I guess? 

I wrote a whole post on reddit about her so ill prob just post that but I personally think she is one of the best units in the game just need to go about her the right way. Mainly in that her starting chapter she kind of doesn't get good chance. And only after words when she gets access to everything everyone else has is when she can really shine. Ill post a link to me reddit post (lots of have disagreed with it so I wanted to come here talk about.) if I need to elaborate on something let me know.

 

 https://www.reddit.com/r/fireemblem/comments/112r2oo/lapis_the_queen_of_engage_maddening/?sort=new

 

[Shadow Mir]

On Tastymond: I saw his boat strats video. Depending on how much of a pain in the arse that chapter is, it might be worth replicating.

Anyways... I would like to know your opinions on the following:

• Celine
• Citrinne
• Etie
• Chloe
• Timerra

[hdawgsizzle]

1 minute ago, Shadow Mir said:

On Tastymond: I saw his boat strats video. Depending on how much of a pain in the arse that chapter is, it might be worth replicating.

Anyways... I would like to know your opinions on the following:

• Celine
• Citrinne
• Etie
• Chloe
• Timerra

I really thought that Ch 19 would be a huge pain, just from looking at the map, but it ended up pretty okay. One of the longest clears for me at nearly 3 hours, but definitely not one of the most difficult clears - you can choke point a lot of the enemies pretty well and then just whittle them down slowly. I didn't go out of my way for the Dracoshield house, which haunts me as the one real "flaw" in my playthrough.

Celine and Citrinne I think are both actually pretty good for when I was using them in the early game. I didn't invest heavily in either, and I let Citrinne replace Celine when she showed up because so many FE games have conditioned me that the specialist unit is better than the generalist unit. I know that Citrinne ends up extremely squishy if you take her to endgame whereas I think Celine might fare better. Zoran used Celine to the end and she never seemed actively bad or harmful or anything. I like both of their personal skills as well. 

Etie didn't make a very good impression on me but I did not invest at all. There's probably some route she can take where she can be good - her Str and Dex are both really good... That abysmal 4 Build though... that's something that's harder to patch up. I kinda thought she was the poster child for the early game unit getting upstaged by a later joiner - in this case, Alcryst - but I don't know that it's so cut and dry.

Chloe, I don't feel super qualified to comment on. I tried to give her some forges and engraves and such in the early game as a way to invest in her, but struggled to really make her work. I kinda had one foot in/one foot out on investing in her. I gave her some good weaponry but didn't give her the energy drop or an early master seal or an Emblem, and she struggled to do damage. Fairy tale folk and Divinely Inspiring can help her out quite a bit, but you have to pay close attention to them. Ostensibly, if you commit, she performs very well. People have said that Griffin Knight Merrin is pretty similar in performance to Chloé, and if that's true then I say go for it! Griffin Merrin was great for me. I just can't speak from experience to how comparable the two units actually are or what their tradeoffs are.

Timerra I was very excited to use. It's been a while since getting just straight up lance infantry units and I like her design and personality. She just really started struggling a lot and not even that long after she joined. From what I've seen, a lot of people have struggled with her too. She struggles a lot to deal damage, and even though she has pretty good base speed, that 5 base build means it's extremely difficult to find a way for her to both deal enough damage and retain her good speed. You could mess around with her skills a bit and try to give her some more build or speed or something... 

Sandstorm is the one thing that really complicates my opinion on Timerra. Zoran used her and gambling for Sandstorm became a funny meme strat, and that's pretty much my opinion of it. I have seen some people try to insist that Timerra is actually good all you need to do is give her every Secret Book in the game, give her Dex+5, Sigurd for Bld and Dex, a Brave Lance to fish for as many Sandstorm procs as possible and then just hope for Sandstorm. At the endgame, this has some viability bc with all of that investment you can get I think ~40+ Dex on her. Is this at all worth it? I don't know. I kinda doubt it, and it seems like it's going to be a pretty steep mountain to climb to get her there

[lenticular]

3 minutes ago, hdawgsizzle said:

Sandstorm is the one thing that really complicates my opinion on Timerra. Zoran used her and gambling for Sandstorm became a funny meme strat, and that's pretty much my opinion of it. I have seen some people try to insist that Timerra is actually good all you need to do is give her every Secret Book in the game, give her Dex+5, Sigurd for Bld and Dex, a Brave Lance to fish for as many Sandstorm procs as possible and then just hope for Sandstorm. At the endgame, this has some viability bc with all of that investment you can get I think ~40+ Dex on her. Is this at all worth it? I don't know. I kinda doubt it, and it seems like it's going to be a pretty steep mountain to climb to get her there

In my hard/classic run, one thing that I found with Timerra was that if I gave her a killer lance, I often found myself in situations where I needed either one of a crit or a sandstorm proc to get a kill with her, which got up to some pretty good levels of reliability. Even at relatively modest values like 50% crit and 30% sandstorm, that gives a 65% chance of hitting at least one of them. Or an 88% of getting one of the four possible procs if she's doubling. And of course, you can get those odds even better if you're willing to invest.

Not sure how well this would hold up in maddening though and I'm not planning on using her in my ongoing maddening run.

[Myssdii]

I've used Timerra in maddening. She's pretty good in the mid game, but end-game is really difficult for her with the enemies inflated stats. She has trouble ORKO unless she procs crit + Sandstorm, and while her crit is decent with engraving + forged Killer Lance, it's not super reliable to get Sandstorm on top unless you've fed her stats boosters. Maddening is not forgiving for physical units, and Timerra is just a bit short of everything.

You really need to give her resources. She's okay with just a bit of investment, but sadly not near top tier unless you are really investing.