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Killer is amazing on Maddening simply because most enemies won't get doubled even with your fastest guys. Like your person running Lyn and maybe a Yunaka speed tier character might get doubles but almost everyone else won't and the doubles you're running usually won't be enough to kill with the HP the enemy has. So you just get killer and gamble on triple damage a bunch. Especially because if you do get a really unlucky turn you can just go back in time and alter the odds.
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Feb 21, 2023 20:23
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And those characters that do get doubles... 
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Feb 21, 2023 20:30
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Also nobody should listen to me at all when it comes to Maddening builds because I play very stupidly, but that's okay because at least I know it. Am I perfectly happy to give Alear stat boosters and Starsphere so they can be a great combat unit? Absolutely. Am I burning DLC SP books to put Starsphere on Yunaka so she can be competitive with Merrin? Yep. Are both of those things exceptionally dumb uses of those resources, especially when Alear can be really valuable as a support unit? You know it. Do I use sword-locked units just because they're cool? Hell yeah. But it's fun and so I do it anyway.
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Feb 21, 2023 20:33
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Harrow posted:Also nobody should listen to me at all when it comes to Maddening builds because I play very stupidly, but that's okay because at least I know it. Yeah but it's fun to hear the unorthodox ways people build their units, especially when the goal isn't 'put everyone in their optimal class and only run the very top units', but just to have fun. It's a way more fun conversation to participate in than another round of 'here is why it is a waste of your time to run x over y'.
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Feb 21, 2023 20:35
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Harrow posted:Also nobody should listen to me at all when it comes to Maddening builds because I play very stupidly, but that's okay because at least I know it. Yunaka is competitive with Merrin I thought? Higher strength for slightly lower speed and def for res on a fog unit feels like a good trade.
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Feb 21, 2023 20:36
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Natural 20 posted:Yunaka is competitive with Merrin I thought? Higher strength for slightly lower speed and def for res on a fog unit feels like a good trade. At equal internal levels as Wolf Knights, Yunaka has 1 more Str and 6 more Res than Merrin and Merrin has significantly more HP, Dex, Spd, Def, and Bld. If you keep Yunaka as a Thief, the difference in Res narrows and becomes just 1 point, too, though Merrin's Dex lead goes away. Merrin is really, really good. Like Yunaka is absolutely usable but Merrin does beat her fairly handily overall.
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Feb 21, 2023 20:42
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You'll aggressively need to invest into Yunaka with an energy drop and forged knives early on on Maddening if you want to keep her around.
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Feb 21, 2023 21:15
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Well I'd encourage people to forge knives on any difficulty, it's a ton of return for a small investment, but yeah it's very important on Maddening. Anyway that's why I'm burning a couple DLC SP books to put Starsphere on her 
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Feb 21, 2023 21:17
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The perspective with early characters on Maddening is less "are they good at equal levels compared to later ones" and more "are they good enough to be a project." Because if you want an early character to compete with the EXP and SP advantage that later characters have, you need to treat them as a project, keep an Emblem ring on them, and give them plenty of experience. The reward for treating Yunaka as a project is a character that's at best competitive with Zelkov or Merrin, not one that's solidly better, so that project slot is better spent on someone who'll have an actual niche. This is why I think Anna's good: because "you have to give her a limited resource to push her through her awkward early period" isn't something unique to her, it's something true of literally every early character on Maddening, and your reward is basically getting another Pandreo. And Pandreo's the best mage outside of Dire Thunder nonsense, so that's a good reward!
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Feb 21, 2023 21:24
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Pandreowns
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Feb 21, 2023 21:26
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Einander posted:This is why I think Anna's good: because "you have to give her a limited resource to push her through her awkward early period" isn't something unique to her, it's something true of literally every early character on Maddening, and your reward is basically getting another Pandreo. And Pandreo's the best mage outside of Dire Thunder nonsense, so that's a good reward! like all citrinne needs is a master seal to be about as good as anna there all clanne or celine need is a spirit drop meanwhile anna demands the first second seal in the game
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Feb 21, 2023 21:30
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ROFL Octopus posted:Pandreowns
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Feb 21, 2023 21:31
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Thank you to this game for blessing us with Saphir, she's so cool and I love her. More absolutely hench old women in future fire emblems, please.
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Feb 21, 2023 21:34
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Endorph posted:not really tbh And to get a ring full-time for the indefinite future, because being level 10 with 500 SP is pretty dire. That hits Alcryst and Lapis pretty hard too.
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Feb 21, 2023 21:36
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Einander posted:And to get a ring full-time for the indefinite future, because being level 10 with 500 SP is pretty dire. That hits Alcryst and Lapis pretty hard too. You do get her when you still have access to Micaiah, who greatly eases skill point generation, though.
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Feb 21, 2023 21:47
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mycatscrimes posted:You do get her when you still have access to Micaiah, who greatly eases skill point generation, though. That's true, but the opportunity cost is that someone else doesn't get to use Micaiah for that same SP generation boost. It definitely does help Anna a lot, but there are others who'd appreciate it, too. None of this means you shouldn’t use Anna if you want to, it’s just worth being aware of the opportunity cost of raising any given early unit because it affects how many other early units you can also train.
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Feb 21, 2023 21:48
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Harrow posted:That's true, but the opportunity cost is that someone else doesn't get to use Micaiah for that same SP generation boost. It definitely does help Anna a lot, but there are others who'd appreciate it, too. Oh, agree in general, and I'm sure on maddening the method of using skirmishes to spam micaiah's skill is a lot dicier and skirmishes are way rarer (not that i did this more than once, just thinking about things that increase the opportunity cost). Anna is quite a pricey unit to put in her best class.
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Feb 21, 2023 21:53
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I mean if youre skirmish grinding what does it matter, you’ve broken the exp scarcity at that point and can support an arbitrary number of characters right?
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Feb 21, 2023 21:59
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mycatscrimes posted:You do get her when you still have access to Micaiah, who greatly eases skill point generation, though. Harrow posted:That's true, but the opportunity cost is that someone else doesn't get to use Micaiah for that same SP generation boost. It definitely does help Anna a lot, but there are others who'd appreciate it, too. Yeah, exactly. Micaiah can fix Citrinne's problem! ...and the problems of about a dozen others, two of whom are joining on the exact same chapter when you have two more chapters to go to meet the first big benchmark. Devoting Micaiah to her for those chapters (or even deferring Jean and Anna's chapters until she joins for a chance to give her more experience) is not a small cost to pay, and long-term she's not competing with Pandreo unless she's got Dire Thunder. Again, at least on Maddening, I don't think it's "is this character good at equivalent level and SP," but "is this character worth investing into to get that equivalent level and SP." Chloe's definitely there, and you have to use Alear anyway, and I think Anna's a solid third pick. And you've got maybe two more slots you can fit in for projects before chapter 10 and 11, when you'll start getting characters that don't need to be treated as projects. (Second Sealing Jean from level 1 is basically two 'slots' worth of investment, too.) That's the big dividing line there. mycatscrimes posted:Oh, agree in general, and I'm sure on maddening the method of using skirmishes to spam micaiah's skill is a lot dicier and skirmishes are way rarer (not that i did this more than once, just thinking about things that increase the opportunity cost). Anna is quite a pricey unit to put in her best class. I don't think Skirmishes can spawn on Maddening at all until after chapter 11.
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Feb 21, 2023 22:02
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Like do whatever you want to make the game more fun for you, that’s not the issue. But if you want to talk about the viability of a character and what resources they need dedicated to them in the tightest part of the game then I think the baseline should be not to be injecting extra into it
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Feb 21, 2023 22:02
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RME posted:I mean if youre skirmish grinding what does it matter, you’ve broken the exp scarcity at that point and can support an arbitrary number of characters right? It's possible to do just a little bit to generate more SP and now go whole hog on 'grind forever lol' and frankly from what I've heard on maddening it's not exactly a free xp goldmine but a significant challenge to use skirmishes to play catchup. It also seems weird to talk about unit balance with the unspoken understanding that one of the tools the game gives is totally off the table? Like if it's understood that all unit comparisons of these are on a 100% pure, not even one map of catchup, maddening difficulty run, that should be specified, because the vanilla game experience supports letting you have a little more flexibility than that.
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Feb 21, 2023 22:03
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No I think it’s completely fair because it’s by far the most consistent rubrics to grade against
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Feb 21, 2023 22:05
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RME posted:Like do whatever you want to make the game more fun for you, that’s not the issue. But if you want to talk about the viability of a character and what resources they need dedicated to them in the tightest part of the game then I think the baseline should be not to be injecting extra into it I certainly didn't argue putting Micaiah on Anna was the best use of resources, just that the game at that point gives you tools to ameliorate her starting SP.
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Feb 21, 2023 22:06
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On maddening you get four skirmishes in the entire campaign, IIRC, with the first appearing after chapter 11.
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Feb 21, 2023 22:07
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RME posted:No I think it’s completely fair because it’s by far the most consistent rubrics to grade against What? I'm just talking about the experience of playing the game, I'm not grading anything. This feels weird.
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Feb 21, 2023 22:08
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Zoran posted:On maddening you get four skirmishes in the entire campaign, IIRC, with the first appearing after chapter 11. This is very relevant thing to bring up, and also good to know going in.
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Feb 21, 2023 22:09
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I think Skirmishes are still time-based on Maddening? Just on a very slow clock. At least I've noticed Skirmishes popping up on the map after I came back to the game in the morning, where if it was capped to a number like that I'd expect them to pop up after certain maps.
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Feb 21, 2023 22:12
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It’s the first I’ve heard of them being anything but time gated and progress for the first one, with maddening having a slow clock, but the refreshing when you start could be just be updating to your current status rather than suggesting they’re still infinite
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Feb 21, 2023 22:16
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skir-mish me with that bullshit - sean connery
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Feb 21, 2023 22:17
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mycatscrimes posted:It also seems weird to talk about unit balance with the unspoken understanding that one of the tools the game gives is totally off the table? It's not that they're totally off the table (though as Zoran pointed out skirmishes are very scarce on Maddening), it's that every unit can benefit from that kind of investment. We're not comparing Anna with heavy investment vs. another unit without heavy investment--we're saying that if you invest that heavily into anyone you can make them great. That's why people tend to disregard things like grinding, stat boosters, etc. in unit comparisons: they apply to everyone.
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Feb 21, 2023 22:17
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You can't just pile Anna with the "awkward early game characters" because Anna can do nothing of value in the early chapters, while characters like Citrinne and Alcryst gains EXP naturally by virtue of being good in the early game, and doesn't just sit in a corner spamming Micaiah. The amount of investment you need to put into Anna is way higher. And even as a 10/5 Sage Anna is still significantly worse than Sage Pandreo; she matches his Mag but has way worse Spd and Bld. And getting 10 levels between Chapter 6 and Chapter 10 won't happen naturally, you already have to actively grind her to get to this point.
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Feb 21, 2023 22:22
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Harrow posted:It's not that they're totally off the table (though as Zoran pointed out skirmishes are very scarce on Maddening), it's that every unit can benefit from that kind of investment. We're not comparing Anna with heavy investment vs. another unit without heavy investment--we're saying that if you invest that heavily into anyone you can make them great. At that point, to me, it feels less like talking about playing the game and more like a theoretical exercise. Which is fine! I thought I was chiming in on a way you can shore up Anna, and that was my intent, not to assert that doing so is the optimal use of resources or what tier list or whatever she is on. I'm not interesting in comparing units that way so strictly.
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Feb 21, 2023 22:23
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i mean in terms of actually playing the game everyone can be made to work extremely easily and obviously, so there isnt really much of a discussion to have there
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Feb 21, 2023 22:26
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Harrow posted:It's not that they're totally off the table (though as Zoran pointed out skirmishes are very scarce on Maddening), it's that every unit can benefit from that kind of investment. We're not comparing Anna with heavy investment vs. another unit without heavy investment--we're saying that if you invest that heavily into anyone you can make them great. The problem with engage is that those resources completely overpower individual unit details to a degree not seen in the series before. Sp on anything other than a chosen unit or two grows so stupidly slowly on everyone that isn't one of the chosen few to get a proper ring. Forged and engraved weapons are in similarly limited supplies and are a massive portion of how combat viable a unit is. Of the initial units you basically pick a couple of gods among men and they will become gods with that gear, no questions asked, even on maddening.
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Feb 21, 2023 22:27
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You can probably count the number of truly unusable units in the series on two hands. Well, maybe you'll need another few hands for New Mystery but that game is uniquely bad for unit balance lol. The usual question people (or at least, longtime FE fans who have been talking about these games for decades) are trying to answer when discussing unit quality is "how much effort does it take to use this unit? And, if you put in the effort, what is the reward you get in the end?" Skirmishes (and equivalent grindy tactics like boss abuse) are inherently time-consuming and a high investment, and a character who is only good when using them (like Fiona in Radiant Dawn) can't be a good unit by that rubric. In theory you could like, evaluate a curve of like "unit A only needs to be babied through one skirmish, unit B needs to be babied through ten" and compare in that way, but in practice the easiest way to evaluate how a unit performs according to this metric is to just assume the player isn't grinding at all. If you happen to enjoy grinding, then the rubric is almost irrelevant because half of the equation is just irrelevant to you.
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Feb 21, 2023 22:27
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mycatscrimes posted:At that point, to me, it feels less like talking about playing the game and more like a theoretical exercise. Which is fine! I thought I was chiming in on a way you can shore up Anna, and that was my intent, not to assert that doing so is the optimal use of resources or what tier list or whatever she is on. I'm not interesting in comparing units that way so strictly. I guess I don't really see it as that theoretical or strict. Like I don't think anyone's saying "never use Anna" or anything like that, just noting that using her is going to be a bit of a project on Maddening, and that's fine, it's just something to be aware of if you want to use her. Using Anna isn't "playing wrong." You might as well use those resources on someone early in the game and if it's not her it's going to be like Chloé or Yunaka or Jean and none of those are objectively right or wrong. When I think about "tier lists" it's really more like... what units take more or less work to get going than others? And what units can provide something unique that nobody else can? For example, Kagetsu's strong as hell the moment he shows up and just using him normally will get you a great unit. Other units, like Jean, can become great but take a comparatively much higher amount of work to get there. That might make Jean "lower tier" than Kagetsu but all that means is he takes more work to get going and might make a couple early chapters a bit tougher, not that he'll hinder you in the long run or is terrible or anything like that. And for examples of unique utility making a unit valuable, that's where I'd put people like Seadall (the only Dancer), Alear (for Dragon type Emblem use), and Hortensia (the best staffbot), where none of them actually need any investment to be good because what makes them good has nothing to do with stats or combat.
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Feb 21, 2023 22:30
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cheetah7071 posted:You can probably count the number of truly unusable units in the series on two hands. Well, maybe you'll need another few hands for New Mystery but that game is uniquely bad for unit balance lol for a unit to be unusable they'd need to be bad in a game that is very strict about resources and the only game in the series that's really that strict about them in fe4
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Feb 21, 2023 22:30
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Harrow posted:It's not that they're totally off the table (though as Zoran pointed out skirmishes are very scarce on Maddening), it's that every unit can benefit from that kind of investment. We're not comparing Anna with heavy investment vs. another unit without heavy investment--we're saying that if you invest that heavily into anyone you can make them great. I don't think people actually disregard stat boosters. You note the degree to which they're necessary to make a unit good, and the degree to which they help. It's competing over a scarce resource, so you can't assume that the unit will get them, but they can get credit for using a scarce resource better than anyone else. Like in this game, Lyn's engrave is kind of hard to use because it gives -3 mt, which is a pretty big downside. But Panette is almost tailor built for it: strength so overkill that the lowered mt doesn't matter, but really wants the accuracy and crit boosts. So any fair ranking of Panette would account for the fact that she's the best user of a scarce resource, without just assuming that she'll always have it. You can (and people do) have similar discussions about stat boosters
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Feb 21, 2023 22:32
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There are lots of different ways you can make units work, and lots of various tips and tricks that are relevant even if you aren't doing a 100% pure ironman ltc maddening no grind run. I was having fun earlier talking with Harrow about various ways to run Panette that they wouldn't necessarily recommend investing in. It just feels lovely to chime into a conversation and get aggressively dismissed because the conversation was playing by unstated rules you weren't privy to because you aren't a hardcore enough player or whatever. Like, I didn't make any assertions besides 'it is possible to catch Anna up on SP' because I like and enjoy raising characters and wanted to mention something that made it easier. And it felt pretty lovely to get 'well yeah if you do that nothing really matters why would you even bring it up' answers!
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Feb 21, 2023 22:33
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cheetah7071 posted:I don't think people actually disregard stat boosters. You note the degree to which they're necessary to make a unit good, and the degree to which they help. It's competing over a scarce resource, so you can't assume that the unit will get them, but they can get credit for using a scarce resource better than anyone else. Like in this game, Lyn's engrave is kind of hard to use because it gives -3 mt, which is a pretty big downside. But Panette is almost tailor built for it: strength so overkill that the lowered mt doesn't matter, but really wants the accuracy and crit boosts. So any fair ranking of Panette would account for the fact that she's the best user of a scarce resource, without just assuming that she'll always have it. You can (and people do) have similar discussions about stat boosters Oh yeah that's true, good point Panette's a great illustration of that, too. Chloé, too, for stat boosters--she'll get a ton of value out of an early Spirit Dust and an early forged Levin Sword, for example.
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Feb 21, 2023 22:35
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