Reiska

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhuj_(weapon)

A little perspective from an F2P player: these 47 units may as well not exist to me anymore, because with the low supply of free orbs I get, there's no possible way I could ever in my right mind use such a limited resource on outdated units which have been powercrept out by new units. It's the same logic as why spending grails on anything but merges is bad play for whales. (For F2Ps that's a much murkier proposition, since they don't have nearly the orb supply to pull copies of coveted SI)

Incorrect. Focus units' odds are completely unchanged. The only thing that changed is the relative quality of off-focus units.

I wouldn't discount the possibility of multiple demotes - enough people complained about the lack of them in year 2, and we know that there's around a 6-month lead time on unit designs for FEH to produce all the assets, so it's conceivable they could be starting to act on those complaints now.

60% of the game's income in 2018 was from Japan, not sure how that compares to 2017.

Not quite yet! 47.29% right now, and that's not counting the OCs

Absolutely a myth, Granblue Fantasy regularly upgrades old characters. There's no reason why FEH can't (further evidenced by the fact it's already been done with the Prf weapon additions).

I don't mind 2-character main banners as long as they don't use them as an excuse to only release 2 characters at a time. (In other words, I'm fine if the standard for new hero events changes to having two 2-unit focuses instead of a single 4-unit focus. Not fine if it changes to only having a single 2-unit focus.)

Well, first off, looking over my notes again, I have to make a minor correction: counting alts, the total number of Elibe units is actually 52, not 54. That's what I get for trying to do math early in the morning. (That said, the non-alts numbers were correct - 36 unique Elibe characters to 30 unique Ylisse characters). I'll fix the original post in a bit. As for the breakdown, it's 33 Blazing Blade and 19 Binding Blade units, alts included.

Awakening's actually significantly under-represented given its popularity. It just feels over-represented because of the large number of Robin alts; there's actually more Elibe units characters in the game than there are Awakening units characters. (not counting alts) This surprised me too, when I actually looked at the numbers - counting alts, we have 74 Fates units, 53 Awakening units, 20 Tellius units, 22 Sacred Stones units, 54 52 Elibe units, 8 Thracia units, 19 Jugdral units, 20 Valentia units, and 38 Archanea units; counting only unique characters, we have 45 from Fates, 30 from Awakening, 13 from Tellius, 13 from Sacred Stones, 36 from Elibe, 6 from Thracia, 19 from Jugdral, 18 from Valentia, and 31 from Archanea. There's definitely room for more (non-alts) out of Awakening, for sure. Otherwise I pretty much agree with the posts so far.

Armorsmasher+ with TA3 kills the hell out of him pretty reliably as long as you're using it from a unit who actually has an ATK score. Red bladetome (or Laevatein) is also effective. TA3 can be countered by Cancel Affinity on Surtr, but if he's running that, he's not running Wary Fighter and then you just blow him up with a red mage, who won't need much help to obliterate him. Svalinn Shield, if you run into THAT, doesn't stop Bladetomes. You can see what he's running before you pick your team, so it's just a matter of having a team with that utility set up. I won't disagree that he's disgustingly strong as a player unit. But as a player unit, you always have the option of not using him if he's not fun to use.

I do feel obligated to point out, since he's come up a lot in this thread, that the problem with Surtr is not his weapon (which is pretty poor in the hands of the AI, since you can just carefully stay out of its range), but his perfectly optimized stat line. Sinmara's broken in the hands of the player, sure, but there it doesn't actually matter much until they start making PvE content that expects you to use him.

This. The player version of Sinmara should have been made to only work once per battle like Fallen Takumi's prf. As for my list: 1. Retroactively upgrade the stats of all "book 1" heroes to modern standards. Prf weapons and refines do not make up for their stat deficit because modern units have access to those things as well. 2. Demote most older 5* exclusive characters who only have 4 skills (the hallmark of modern demotions) to 3-4*. Some exceptions can be made for those who have skills that could unbalance the game if made too common (Fighter skills other than Wary, DC/CC, etc.) 3. Either make basic movement assists available in some form other than the gacha, or make them significantly more common (perhaps by giving every unit with an empty assist slot some kind of basic movement assist). 4. More banners, in general. Bring back 4* focus banners. Consider having banners with special properties like a boosted rate for a specific color across all rarities (similar to GBF's regular element banner rotation). Maybe split the 3-4* pool into multiple subgroups which alternate on different focuses, to make specific lower-rarity heroes less paradoxically rare. 5. Make Mythic blessings and Legendary blessings able to coexist on the same unit.

It'll surely happen, but I sincerely doubt it'll happen in the hyperbolic time frames people are talking about. It would not especially shock me to see another baseline bump happen with roughly the start of book 3, probably moving most new units in each class up one bin, though. However, I would *hope* that if they do that, they issue retroactive adjustments to the stats of the current "book 1" units to ensure they continue to be viable.

Fjorm.