I remember a time where Knights were prized for their reliable defensive capabilities (meaning less reliance on RNG than dodgetanks). Then people started caring about turn counts and things changed; but that's a problem with the community, not with the game design.
Rebel against the LTC ubermensch!
Except armors are still bad because they don't have the right parameters in the right places. When IS designs scenarios in which high def, despite the lack of spd, is actually useful, then armors would be more useful.
* and when IS stops providing strictly superior alternatives in the form of bulky cavaliers and wyvern riders.
Why do some people here hate LTC so much? Even if I wasn't a fan of it, it wouldn't personally affect me if people here like really liked Bors or something. I'd still think he'd suck. Plus while the tier lists are made with efficiency in mind, that really just means it's less efficient to use lower tier characters. Nothing's stopping you from doing so (except maybe in FE4).
The latter reason is precisely my feeling about it.Well I'm butthurt because it killed tier list activity and encourages shit like RNG abusing to follow cookie cutter strategies. Then again the most vocal people against LTC don't really have the same reason.
I find it amusing how much LTC insists itself to be "efficient" while ignoring the inherent inefficiency of unnecessary resetting, ever. Especially for players who, I believe, at least some of them have expressed a desire to not "waste" any more of their time playing the game than necessary. Perhaps they haven't noticed that time doesn't not pass just because the game forgets that it does?
Actually, people starting examining the game to a higher standard and actually began applying the standards that tier lists were based on consistently. That's hardly a problem. If anything, it's a good thing that people finally woke up and noticed that hey, Gilliam's defense is actually not that useful in a game where enemies are as weak as FE8's.
I'm trying to do a LTC run of FE12 H3 myself, and when I mean "efficient", I mean turn-wise, not time-wise. It (unfortunately) involves a bunch of RNG bending or outright abuse, simply due to the fact that I've found no way around it. A good example is C15, where you I found you need to kill like 7-10 people (some having 2 range) with 2 people in one enemy phase, one of whom has to be a caster so you can properly rescue in the correct location next turn. Said caster needs to have like 15 uses of Nosferatu (and thus HAS to be a chick -- Yumina, Mal, or Linde), must avoid a OHKO from any given enemy (they have 37-39 ATK), and must double and ORKO them. So you need a Linde with like 38 HP, ~21 MAG (after RP and sphere and statboosters), and 24 SPD. There are a bunch of other strats where crits with killers/shaver may be necessary too, or ones where hit rates of 70% might need to be hit a few times. It's not that there's no strategy involved, it's more that RNG abuse AND strategy is involved.
However, there are many FEs (probably most of them) where RNG abuse needed is much less severe (and thus the number of resets needed) -- these tend to be the ones that dondon has done 0% growth efficiency runs; in these, enemies aren't strong enough that it's required or you get people like Marcus or Seth or Miledy or the ilk that work well at base -- then LTC comes down to stocking up on buyable boots (FE6 =P) or some other gimmick and then using the proper strats.
That means you don't try to kill 7-10 enemies with two characters in one enemy phase. There's your way around it: stop going for minimum turns.
Why is it that every one who doesn't play LTC has to be so fucking smug and condescending about it? Do you know how much of an ass you look like right now? This kind of post is crap, and you will never see an LTC player talking the same way about any other playstyle, despite the fact that every one-yourself most definitely included-gets so damn butthurt about LTC runs.
Most people (me included) lack the patience for crunching binomial distributions in order to determine the exact chance of failure of a given strategy. Whereas determining the number of turns that a given strategy takes is extremely easy.
Moreover, it's an extremely narrow definition. What it would probably produce is something like this tier list, with Franz moved to low (because of his bad luck and reliance on growing stats), and other growth units moved down (such as Artur, Kyle, Garcia and so on). If you notice, this tier list produced only 4 pages of discussion, so you are probably in the minority for thinking this kind of thing is "interesting".
You really don't get it, do you?
The point is not to pick a given strategy and hope that the number of times you'll have to reset for it to work will be as low as possible. The point is that you do what works and live with stat screwage, character deaths, etc. rather than having only one strategy to begin with.
In other words, ACTUALLY PLAYING THE FUCKING GAME. The thing any pre-planned LTC playthrough is not even doing.
I've done no-reset runs before. I think they're good for second or third playthroughs. Adapting to mistakes and using other units out of necessity can be enjoyable. I don't think these types of runs lend themselves well to tiering units, though. If you wanted to optimize such runs to the tier list aims, you'd end up deriving and executing high-reliability strategies that best accomplish the aims of the tier list - which you seem to want to avoid. You might expect frail units like Herons to be penalized by a no-restart tier list, but if I have sufficient mastery of the game's strategies, I can use them to their full potential while minimizing the risk of their demise.
In that case, how much do you reset? That is, for a specific LTC playthrough you've done, what's your estimate for how many times you reset throughout the course of the run?
I do reset a lot - maybe an average of 8 times per chapter - but a majority of my runs are recorded, and I reset often for minor cosmetic improvements, e.g. rearranging the order of unit actions so that I can maximize L-switching, eliminating superfluous unit actions entirely, and satisfying my OCD with even numbers. Other times I lack detailed information about the game and need to poke my head out a little bit to figure out how the AI works in certain maps. If you want to consider only the resets that can be attributed to poor planning or something going wrong, that can range any where from 0 times per chapter (for the really easy ones) to 4 times per chapter (for the really hard ones).
Getting a low turn clear on maps is more than just about wanting to clear in the lowest possible time. If I really wanted to do that, I wouldn't do 0% growths, and I wouldn't aim for the lowest turncount possible. As much as I hate wasting time playing video games, I still enjoy a challenge, and the experience wouldn't really be the same otherwise.
...Phew. I think that's all of them. Commence discussion!
