De Geso

I missed Catria and Palla until after I recruited Est the first time I played through. As a result, Est was my best flier since I had had her for a while.

Early on I don't advise ever not exploring or battling. However, once you get toward the end of the game and all your units are in their final classes, you can rest and auto-instruct pretty safely.

I'll probably replay Crimson Flower once all the DLC is released, but before then I will take a break. I may wait until Wave 3 is released before I start my NG+ Golden Deer run.

Raphael can weaken the units for your long-term characters to get the kills. I know that's a scary thought, having a unit at low HP, but as long as he doesn't die (which he won't if he faces only one enemy prior to healing) it doesn't matter. He's more durable than Hilda to the degree that it is significant. In the early game, when both units get doubled, he takes 2 less damage per round of combat which can, in some cases, mean he is surviving two rounds when she isn't. I'm not talking about his growth potential, stop changing the subject. I'm talking about what he is able to do at base that gives him a niche, not what makes him this stellar growth unit, because he should be benched fairly early for a better combat unit. No, that is my point - Cyril, at base, at chapter 5, is worse than Raphael at chapter 1. His stats, point-for-point, in each stat, are lower than Raphael's (except Res and Charm which are not relevant to either character's performance) four chapters later. He is garbage at base at a time when the rest of your army has been trained to some degree. Raphael may be awful, he may be the worst student in the game, but that isn't the point - is he better than Cyril on Maddening? Yes, demonstrably, because he has some kind of marginally effective early-game niche which the latter can not boast. Cyril can grow into a better unit than Raphael, yes, but that does not matter in the context of Maddening where your units are either Byleth, your lord, one or two trained in-house units, and recruits with good bases. "Time to grow" is so limited in Maddening Cyril is not who you want to spend it on. I know your Raphael died a couple times on Hard so you hate him and think he's worse than garbage, but you have to look at things objectively. (No, "he's slow and gets doubled so he is automatically horrible" is not objective). I don't go around saying Annette is the best mage in the game because my Annette is magic-blessed and one-shots everything. Objectively, she is simply not that good at it (rally utility not being relevant to her performance as an offensive magic unit).

It amazes me how deftly Cincinnati threw the game away yesterday. "We have less than 30 rushing yards this half. It's first and goal and we're performing quite well in the air. Let's run up the middle and waste two downs, what could go wrong?" Truly phenomenal play calling. I'd love to hear their rationale for that one. Not the first game they've done this so far this year, either.

The difference between the GBA fighters and Raphael is that the former do not have access to brave weapons at E rank. Even if they are low-might, Raphael still does 12x2 damage to any enemy (15x2 with Hilda support) at base which is enough to take off about half their health on Maddening. You keep jumping around in circles, Levant. The point of the discussion is: does early game Raphael have a niche, and does that niche make him more valuable than Cyril? Considering that he is tied for highest Strength of the Golden Deer (not counting Byleth), I would say, "Yes, he does, in that he can do fairly accurate and fairly high damage to a unit on the player phase without needing to use a combat art and has the HP (highest in the GD outright) and defense (tied for highest in the GD) to take on 2 enemies on EP, which is something almost no other unit on Maddening can say besides Dedue who you don't have and Byleth who is broken. He falls off quickly, yes, and he is not a particularly good unit, but he can contribute at base and for another chapter or two and Cyril cannot. Raphael is a bad unit but he is certainly better than Cyril, who would have bad bases in Chapter 1. It's kind of silly to argue this point when the only stat level 1 Cyril has over level 1 Raphael is a single point of Res. He grows to be better, sure, but who cares when getting him there is troublesome?

It's nothing like SMT or FE at all. It's a quite generic JRPG with an idol theme some people may like. Personally, my interest begins and ends with "those are some cute girls," but that's not enough to make a mediocre game good on its own.

You can PM me about it if you want, or make a separate thread. Didn't mean to derail this. I do think this is a cool idea and something I'd like to do myself when I have the opportunity/am out of games to play.

You are ignoring a number of external factors more important than raw stats. First, the amount of time that Sain is better than Kent because the former is promoted while the latter is not. Assuming promotion gains account for around 3 levels, Sain gets a huge jump in utility over Kent (not to mention the ubiquitous movement increase that comes from promoting regardless of class) right away. Furthermore, even if he levels up half as quickly, he still maintains his lead until Kent hits level 15 and isn't at a disadvantage until Kent hits 17. I'm assuming that Kent remains at level 10 and Sain immediately hits "13+" (10/1 being basically as strong as a level 13 Kent in this scenario, with the "+" signifying the point of movement that Kent will never gain via leveling). Second, the limited amount of time Kent spends being better than Sain. Even if we assume that Kent is indeed stronger than Sain after he waits until level 20 to promote (which outside of this abstract scenario he realistically would not be), he is only stronger for a relatively brief period of the game, and, and this is important, it isn't as if Sain stops contributing the moment Kent promotes at 20. Kent's overall contribution only outweighs Sain's if, at the end of the game, Kent contributed more than Sain did overall. This is almost certainly not the case given their disparity in usefulness for 10 of Kent's levels and how much smaller that disparity is (though it would admittedly be in Kent's favor) by the time Kent has promoted. If Kent is only better than Sain for 5 chapters, and marginally so, but Sain was significantly better than Kent for 5 chapters while the latter waited to promote, obviously Sain is better overall than Kent - in large part because he promoted earlier. Regardless of all that, though, you're ignoring one important thing: a unit who is not gaining experience is not suddenly garbage and unusable. If Sain hits 10/20, yes, his stats will be lower than Kent's at 20/20...but they'll still be high enough to contribute to completing the game, and in an easy game like FE7, he won't have any trouble at all. Even if we look at a difficult game like FE6, a unit promoted at 10 and hitting level 20 is more than capable of contributing through the fight with Jahn. In the meantime, they contributed more than their counterparts who waited to promote because for a non-trivial portion of the more difficult parts of the game their stats and movement were higher.

"Best strategy in basically every game in the series since 4" lolwut

"Raised the bar" in terms of devotion, absolutely. I think Hubert makes for a better retainer, though.

L'Arachel, of course. I also like to use Est characters in general, but strangely I don't like Donnels.

Shadow Dragon Hard 5 difficulty. If you're a bad enough group of dudes, you can handle it.

Welcome to the forum.

The maps I like the least are the ones where there are no side objectives or gimmicks to make the map interesting, no interestingly placed enemy groups, and a weak or mediocre boss who doesn't pose any real threat to the player's units. In other words, I don't like most of Awakening's maps.

I don't care.

Would you think of this one as "reckless and really serious" if it happened to another player? Why is this hit in particular so egregious? I'm not trying to antagonize you specifically - it's the position that injuring players should be a punishable offense to the degree that you've suggested.

The modern NFL is candy-assed enough as it is. Are we going to start suspending and ejecting players every time they make a big hit against somebody and the latter is hurt? Eventually we will get to a point where the players just play catch up-and-down the field all game because the defense is too afraid to actually tackle the ball carrier with any degree of force at all.

With Hit+20 the accuracy loss is mostly mitigated, and Hit+20 is hardly bad in other scenarios.

Azure Moon is the only route that has early game tanks and consistent high damage. You mustn't have played CF on Maddening - the lower number of chapters just means that there is a greater difficulty increase between each chapter.

There are only a handful of post-timeskip paralogues that require cross-recruitment. In fact, I can only think of Mercedes and Caspar.

I did this for my first playthrough. It's fun. Really, if you recruit more than 3-4 units from outside your house you are going to end up benching a few units anyway. Enough units for a full team plus 3 adjutants is plenty - especially when, unless a unit was stat-screwed, most adjutant units aren't going to see the light of day anyway.

The Brass Bears. The Brass Bear students pride themselves on their strength of heart and body. Naturally, many of the students in this house eschew wielding magic or riding a mount into battle in favor of crushing their enemies with sheer force. There would be one requisite healer and one mage, as well as a single student with a Budding Talent in reason to give her a boost to critical, or something. The house leader is decided by a contest of strength at the start of the year rather than by status. Most of the students in this house are crest-less commoners (there is a lone exception, though the noble family into which he was born is not a very well-to-do one in the Kingdom). The leader of this house in the year Byleth joins as a professor is a tall, brusque, animal-like man who acts on his instinct of what is and is not right to do at the time with little foresight nor patience for ideals. He would specialize in axes and brawling, and his personal promoted classes (Barbarian Lord and Barbarian King) would be a mix of the Assassin and Warrior class, able to move through terrain unimpeded while boasting the raw power of Warriors. The eight units would be: The route would entail the students carving out their own piece of Fódlan and creating a fourth major territory - a place where barbarism reigns supreme and the populace distances themselves from the tiresome affairs of nobility and crests.

The only thing I'm not crazy about is the number of uses for the early game magic. It doesn't matter late because the maps go by pretty quickly, but early on only having five heals and four thunders can seriously hamper someone's usefulness. This is remedied by chapter 5 or so, though, so it's not so bad.

Welcome.