Fire Emblem Discussion

[Jordan]

This new banner is fucking insane. Of course they wait until everyone drained off on Ike before introducing something like this! Were you summoning around the circle, or just focusing on certain colours? I do want Hector and especially Azura, but I don't care as much about Takumi and Ryoma.

I also don't think I care much about that upcoming Tome mage summon focus... Linde would be nice, but none of them are really must-haves for me.

Edited to add, if we assume there will be 9 free orbs from the May quests, and the 2-per-day until 7 May, we should have almost 30 free orbs before this summon focus goes away. That's at least a couple free pulls at these all-star heroes.

Since the focus had one of each color hero, I just summoned everything.

To be honest, I think I would have preferred more variety. I was feeling good about 2 Hectors and would have preferred getting a Ryoma or Takumi at that point, but I can't complain too much. Training some of these characters up, I definitely think the 5* Lilina was a real prize too. I'm just not sure how to fit her onto my team or what kind of skills she would make the best use of. If I got a really terrible 5* Tharja (-Atk or something), I'd give her that tome I guess. That's not particularly likely though. The Lilina I have is +atk, -def, which is fantastic, but the -def makes her a probably poor user of Henry's tome too. Another option might be to give her Henry's green tomebreaker and have her oriented entirely around crushing all the meta green mages, or to give her swordbreaker.

[Kong Wen]

I find the on-type Tomebreakers are generally overkill (although I haven't played with Lilina, so I don't know). +Atk/-Def looks great on her, though. I like to give them Tomebreakers of their own type, to increase the variety of units they can be viable against (so R Tomebreaker on her, allows her to have the colour advantage against greens and a skill advantage against reds—she's not going to be great against blues regardless). She could make Henry's tome work if you give her something like Desperation and basically play her injured to one-shot everything without ever getting hit again. She'll also be a good natural counter to Hectors right out of the box.

I threw down a few bucks today, since Ike drained my stockpile, and since Azura has always been one of the units I've wanted. I was only summoning green and blue, since I already have Takumi and Ryoma is similar to Ike. I got 5* Merric on my second roll, kept going, after a while got Ephraim with an OK but not great nature, and decided to continue summoning around the board to take advantage of my %, and ended up with Ryoma anyway. Drained out my last few orbs and got Azura on my very last pull. Woot! Pretty decent haul overall. Still Hectorless, but I can live with that. I can't decide whether I should spend my freebie orbs from the daily logins and May quests trying for Hector again or save them for the upcoming Linde banner.

[Jordan]

Lilina's speed is really bad so Green Tomebreaker could be the difference between one rounding a green mage or not. At the very least, it would significantly improve her damage against them. Being able to one round foes rather than not can save your team on the next turn. It also improves her own defensive strength as it guarantees that the enemy cannot double her, making her better at tanking those hits. Red Tomebreaker however is not a bad idea on her either. It's probably just as good. On the other hand, I feel like Nino, Julia, Merric, Cecilia and Bunny Camilla are more common these days than Lilina, Tharja, Leo and Sanaki (Henry, Sophia and Raigh are not even worth mentioning; they suck). Soren adds to the pile of green mages and will probably start seeing use soon. Female Robin basically doesn't exist in the meta admittedly. I actually think that red mages may be the least common in this meta as I see a lot of Reinhardt (who I hate), Olwen, Male Robin and Linde these days as well. I think the biggest problem with red mages is that most people's teams are inundated with red sword users. For coverage, people tend to look for green or blue mages to cover the whole weapon triangle. Green mages seem like the most common which is probably because axes are the least common outside of Hector.

Desperation unfortunately only works if you outspeed enemies. Since Lilina can't outspeed anything, it probably wouldn't work well on her.

Those sound like amazing rolls. I really don't want to drop more money on the game but the mage banners are also calling out to me. I would kill for a good Sanaki or Tharja. I wouldn't complain if I got a Linde either. On the male side, a 5* Henry would be nice for collection purposes and a male Robin would be great for bolstering the one I already have. I couldn't care less about Merric but Leo would be nice to have.

[Kong Wen]

I did something crazy today. I had a spare Effie from a few weeks ago, and rather than waste her for 2 stat points merging her into my main Effie, I thought it might be nice to pass off Death Blow 3. I was trying to decide whether to give it to +Atk Cherche or neutral Reinhardt (both were 4-star, since I wasn't going to commit to making them gold unless I had a full build for them). This morning I pulled a 5-star Camilla with some quest orbs, and I immediately unlocked Cherche up to 5-star and gave her Camilla's Brave Axe+ and Effie's Death Blow 3.

Still leveling her right now (and amassing SP), but she'll have Brave Axe+, Reposition, Draconic Aura, Death Blow 3, Axebreaker 3 (she one-rounds Hector), Goad Fliers, and my Attack Seal.

[Jordan]

That sounds great Kong. I was going to do something very similar. I have a 4* +atk Cherche and was thinking in the long term of spending 40,000 feathers to get a 5* camilla, pass on brave axe+ and then steal Hawkeye's deathblow 3 to turn Cherche into an almighty force of divine punishment. Like you, I was also going to pass reposition to her. The only difference is I was thinking of giving her moonbow and wings of mercy instead.

I don't know if/when I will actually follow through on this though. 40,000 feathers is a really steep investment and my inclination to make God Cherche declined significantly after rolling 3 Hectors. Brave Axe+ and Deathblow is a great build on her though. There isn't much that can deal with her damage.

[Kong Wen]

She even one-rounds several reds. She's a monster. I have been getting more mileage than I expected out of Axebreaker, which is good for my particular team comp because my only red unit is usually Olivia. It's slightly less necessary when you have another good sword like Ike, Ryoma, or Lucina. Wings would certainly be an interesting option on her, though. I have so many wimpy mages that benefit from Moonbow that it made sense for me to give her an Atk-based special.

What have you done with your Hectors? I'd be drooling to put one of the Distant Counters on Zephiel.

[Kong Wen]

I started playing Fates again and immediately recalled why I stopped in the first place. Besides the totally shitty cast of characters, the game is super hard. I just failed to visit 3/5 villages 3-4 times in a row on the Ice Village mission (chapter 8?), and that was enough to make me shut it back down.

Edit: On my 10th try, I finally managed to visit the three villages, but only Kong and Effie were still alive, so there was no hope. On to attempt #11!

[Jordan]

I started playing Fates again and immediately recalled why I stopped in the first place. Besides the totally shitty cast of characters, the game is super hard. I just failed to visit 3/5 villages 3-4 times in a row on the Ice Village mission (chapter 8?), and that was enough to make me shut it back down.

Edit: On my 10th try, I finally managed to visit the three villages, but only Kong and Effie were still alive, so there was no hope. On to attempt #11!

I think I did either 3/5 or 4/5 once. My strategy was to abuse freeze staffs to lock those damn looters in their place and have the cavalry run in.

Fates is a brutally hard game, which I actually kind of like because a lot of the mechanics help the player. Pair up is still really strong for instance, but was balanced so that offense pair ups are just as good as defensive ones in certain scenarios. I really love the mechanics of the game, but I admit that I've been stuck in limbo on it for awhile too. I never finished Revelations and stopped about 2 chapters away from the end in Birthright Lunatic. Difficulty wise it kind of reminds me of Radiant Dawn, which to me is a big improvement over the imbalanced sorcerer snorefest that was Awakening.

No arguments regarding the totally shitty cast of characters, though it had some real winners for me too. I hate the protagonist and many others but I also really liked Niles, Nina and especially Azama.

[Kong Wen]

I haven't really had a good chance to use pair ups yet—I usually have more need for two units than for a slight buff on one—although I can see it being useful in the right situation.

I did end up beating that last mission with the maximum goal/reward, but it cost me Odin's life. Is 10,000 gold worth more than an Odin? I think so.

Are castle battles worth it?

[Jordan]

@ Odin: That really depends. Odin himself is mediocre but his daughter is potentially a goddess. With Elise or Nyx as her mother, she reaches a very high magic stat and is useful as a nuke. Most people also think that the tomes you get from her stage are valuable as well. IIRC they are normally Hoshido only tomes such as Calamity Gate (reverses weapon triangle meaning your mage will counter blues) and Horse Spirit (grants defensive bonuses).

Castle battles are worthwhile of course since you get experience and support ranks. You can also grind castle battles against other players for support ranks. This works even in Conquest, but you won't get experience points. It can be useful though for marrying off your army and unlocking the paralogues. The paralogues themselves scale in level depending on where you are in the story. I would caution against doing Benny's late though as the child characters at a certain point will be level 20 unpromoted while enemies may be level 20 promoted.