Comments on post #2927581

@NWSiaCB on post #2927581 (eirika, ephraim, frederick, innes, and seth (fire emblem and 3 more) drawn by ijiro_suika)

2017-11-28T23:18:41-05:00

After having seen it, it turns out that it ironically makes a lot of staff-users suck a lot more, at least by comparison. Because all the buffs only go to 5* units, it basically means that any 4* is now much less useful, relatively speaking.

One of the odd upsides to staff users before was that it didn't really matter if you didn't have a 5*, because the only actual skills you get at 5* are a single passive, and nearly all of those were common crap passives like +3 Res or Spur Def 3 that you could easily inherit from other sources. This meant that even though the only good healing skill was Rehabilitate, at least you could just inherit that and a Live To Serve 2 onto whichever units you wanted, because you're going to be drowning in Rhyses.

Now, all of a sudden, the only one of my units that gets the new hotness Rehabilitate+ is Bride Lyn, who actually gets a pretty decent upgrade. Bride Lyn in particular is almost actually useful as a direct combat unit (her candlelight's upgrade directly eliminates the stave's most crushing weakness in that damage is halved), while Elise would actually make a decent nuisance unit with Gravity+ (unit hit plus adjacent units are reduced to 1 movement point for a turn), provided someone else can reposition her back out of harm's way and nobody can counterattack her (meaning you're now invincible against melee as long as you can pull that trick off... again, ranged units have such a massive advantage in this game...). By comparison, all your old 4* healers (and you would never spend the 20k feathers to 5* them for a mere +2 to all stats and a crappy +1 passive) get no benefit whatsoever from the changes, so they're left in the dust, while all the inherited skills you passed around (rehabilitate and pain for everyone!) are now obsolete, forcing you to use the (often crappier) upgraded versions of the character's default skills. Hence, if you got stuck with a 5* Sakura, then yay, you get *sigh* Physic +, the flat-out worst healing ability in the game if you are trying to use their default skills. Sure, you can still inherit, but now you need to inherit from a 5* version of Rhys, and oh boy is that ever a waste.

Meanwhile, regarding the "future where you need tons of SP", the only units that might need more SP are the 5* staves you suddenly found a reason to use. Sure, the new refined weapons take SP to unlock, but the refinery currencies are so scarce right now you basically get to choose ONE unit to upgrade, so it's obviously going to be your most heavily used character that qualifies, and as previously mentioned, THOSE characters are always going to be swimming in SP. It's actually just that now you need way more fucking feathers, which isn't a change, because the game's basically built to ensure you ALWAYS need more fucking feathers.

@Garrus on post #2927581 (eirika, ephraim, frederick, innes, and seth (fire emblem and 3 more) drawn by ijiro_suika)

2017-11-20T14:59:53-05:00

~~You better hope they don't do a crossover with Fate starring Kojirou then. Everything will just be a bigger swallow.~~

@zergvsgenin on post #2927581 (eirika, ephraim, frederick, innes, and seth (fire emblem and 3 more) drawn by ijiro_suika)

2017-11-20T13:17:21-05:00

One of my problems with the way I play is that defense tends to take a backseat to Speed. Units that are slow AF get much less priority to someone who can at least keep themselves from easily get doubled. And even if they CAN get doubled, that's when I look to their defenses. Skill loadout is also important, particularly good supports and specials that fit that particular unit's set, but I tend to find myself wanting due to habitual thirst.

~~Everything is a dragon if you squint hard enough.~~

@NWSiaCB on post #2927581 (eirika, ephraim, frederick, innes, and seth (fire emblem and 3 more) drawn by ijiro_suika)

2017-11-18T02:52:30-05:00

Garrus said:

... So glad I've stuck to FGO. Geronimo and Phantom of the Opera are the only two truly bad units, everyone else has SOME use.

Well, the basic problem is that you can only have a party of four characters, and it takes severe optimizations to survive some of the more difficult challenges, which in turn means you need to invest a lot of effort into making a few best units, and the rest are generally just spare parts to be cannibalized for skills on your primary team. (As it says, you need a lot of SP to make a unit good, but then, if you have a good unit and use it, it gains tons of SP on its own, to the point that my primary team is always maxed out at 9999 SP - and 2000-3000 is all you'll EVER need - and even the tagalongs for a Tempest Trial, like Titania from the one before last, wound up getting about 4000 SP in two weeks just from doing the baseline missions... Basically, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy that you'll never need SP on anyone you actually use, and you actually use the ones who are good.)

In that sense, nearly every unit has some use in the form of inheritance fodder, although even that isn't universally true. (Unless you're 5*, fuck off, Bartre, nobody needs Brash Assault, and I've got enough Hinatas to cover my need for rage.)

They tried shaking this up with the Chain Battles, and the Arena Assault afterwards, but that just means that instead of needing four fantastic units and the rest are just inheritance fodder, you now need 28 fantastic units, and the rest are inheritance fodder.

Even if you wanted more units, any unit you haven't optimized by cannibalizing units to fill up the characters' slots with skills is going to be blatantly inferior to an optimized character, and you have a very limited amount of resources to optimize with. (Especially if you need to cannibalize 5* units for some skills...) No matter how you look at it, the game punishes trying to keep a diverse team of specialists for particular situations, and rewards having a single all-powerful team of generalists. As I said back regarding Robin, his Atk is so low that even giving him triangle adept (and you need to have a lot of Roys around unless you're going to burn a 5* for the full Traingle Adept 3...) only gets him up to the combat potential Eldigan or Lilina have out of the box, and they aren't crippled into only being able to fight grey and red doing it. (And guess what?! Eldigan's getting one of these unique buffs, too! Sorry, Cain, but it looks like Brave Sword+ is out of style, so you might wind up relegated to my second-best team... But you won't be lonely, that's where Abel is, anyway.)

Beyond that, however, there are two major reasons never to take melee infantry besides dancers: One is the way that movement was restricted to one to three tiles per turn instead of the real Fire Emblem's general movement of five to nine tiles just screws melee infantry over to the point that you absolutely need to have someone tank... and again, if you're going to tank, you might as well take an armor that tanks better (higher base stats) and gets armor emblem for +6 to all stats. (Even if you need to tank magic, just take Sheena...) That leads to the second, which is that every form of movement besides infantry gets a special skill that lets them get either +6 Atk and Spd or +6 Def and Res (or +1 Movement for armors, which directly solves their most critical weakness), and with an entire team cross-buffing, you can have +6 to all stats to all units. So basically, before taking an infantry, you have to ask, "Is there anything this unit can do that can in any way justify not having +6 to all stats?" It's no small part of why, of my batch of elite units, 14 are cavalry, 5 are armor, 4 are fliers, and then I've got two dancers, Nino, Lilina, and Girl!Corrin.

@Garrus on post #2927581 (eirika, ephraim, frederick, innes, and seth (fire emblem and 3 more) drawn by ijiro_suika)

2017-11-18T01:04:44-05:00

... So glad I've stuck to FGO. Geronimo and Phantom of the Opera are the only two truly bad units, everyone else has SOME use.

@NWSiaCB on post #2927581 (eirika, ephraim, frederick, innes, and seth (fire emblem and 3 more) drawn by ijiro_suika)

2017-11-18T00:51:17-05:00

I foresee a future where you need tons and tons of SP.

Just grind on Friday/Saturday... I already basically set it aside as my "grind up new 5*s" day.

But still... *sigh*, this update is really going to throw everything out of whack. That said, I guess it was inevitable, since many of the hypothetically powerful iconic characters are outclassed. (Although they're strangely not buffing Falchion, while Marth continues to wallow in the pit of Lv1s I'm not even going to bother leveling....)

(Although, unless they're giving out Genny's passive to every staff user and making staff just the grey tome, or they're overtly going to include a mode with more units on the map, it's thoroughly pointless to try to make staves more powerful. This is a game of glass cannons and tanks, and the only dagger/shuriken user anyone likes is Kagerou. The entire concept of taking up a character slot for a healer is basically rendered obsolete by the Renewal skill in most situations outside of armors tanking an entire enemy team at once, so anything but making staff users tanks or DPS or outright changing the fundamentals of the game is pointless... And Azama is already a half-decent tank, honestly, but they seem to want to try to make staves into DPS....)

The same goes for a lot of the melee infy units they're buffing: The problem isn't so much that they need another couple points of speed or another passive that's basically just more Brash Assault, the problem is that melee infantry need to be tanks or they are very likely to die before they get in range to start with... and that means a lot of units that aren't Brave Ike are going to get killed before they reach their targets, and if you're going to tank with a slow melee unit, you might as well take Black Knight and Hector out and tank properly. At this point, the best they can do is just give up and create an infantry emblem set.