Arena Discussion Thread (inc. Assault)

[mampfoid]

3 hours ago, Vaximillian said:

My Sharena disagrees.

Ok, of my askirs then. My Sharena is good too, I gave her the double bond. 

[Javi Blizz]

So, I’ve just got my best score ever 3706. Will it be enough to keep T20? I can’t fish higher than that, only missed 1-2 kills with Fjorm

[Humanoid]

8 minutes ago, Javi Blizz said:

So, I’ve just got my best score ever 3706. Will it be enough to keep T20? I can’t fish higher than that, only missed 1-2 kills with Fjorm

There was some inflation last week because of water week + Fjorm bonus unit, but this week should be a return to normalcy, where the cutoff to stay tends to be around the 3690 mark.

[Javi Blizz]

20 minutes ago, Humanoid said:

There was some inflation last week because of water week + Fjorm bonus unit, but this week should be a return to normalcy, where the cutoff to stay tends to be around the 3690 mark.

Nice! :D

Also got my higher non-Fjorm week AA mark (5119).

It seems a good start of the Arena week 

[Ice Dragon]

Since the next Arena bonus Heroes list is the Halloween banner, it looks like it'll be there to stay for three weeks if they want it to overlap with Halloween itself.

I hope I can +10 a Myrrh fast enough to help Tiki with the annoying pile of green armors that always shows up.

[Diovani Bressan]

5 hours ago, mampfoid said:

Nice, and you still have merging potential. Soren would make good use of Helbindis skill, he can chill with his tome and chip with windsweep (alternatively double chill).

That's right. I am using Soren since he got his Wind's Brand. The skill set I use with Soren outside Arena is a little different:

Wind's Brand / Reposition / Iceberg / Distant Def 3 / Desperation 3 / Close Guard 3 / Flashing Blade SS.

My Soren is +Spd -Def, so with the help of Marth's drive buffs, the ally support with Lucius and the buffs from the Owl Tome effect, he can use Flashing Blade effectively.  If Marth, Nowi and Lucius are adjacent to Soren, he gets  +16 Atk (+6 from the owl effect, +5 from Marth, +5 from Lucius's support and Drive Atk or Spur Atk), + 13 Spd (+6 from Owl effect, +5 from Marth, +2 Lucius's support), + 16 Def and + 16 Res (+6 from Owl Effect, +2 from Marth, +3 from Nowi's drive def and res, +5 from Lucius's Support and Spur Def/Res) but he can get +6 Def/Res from Distant Def is it's Enemy's Phase. He can reach 66 Atk, 52 Spd, 37 Def and 54 Res during enemy's phase and against a ranged foe, which is prety good, right?

I decided to give him Chill Res because 3 of the 4 units in my infantry team are magic users: Nowi, Soren and Lucius.

[mampfoid]

27 minutes ago, Diovani Bressan said:

 The skill set I use with Soren outside Arena is a little different:

Of course, Arena is just baby-sitting. 

27 minutes ago, Diovani Bressan said:

He can reach 66 Atk, 52 Spd, 37 Def and 54 Res during enemy's phase and against a ranged foe, which is prety good, right?

Sounds awesome, I shoudl start to build mine as well. Three adjacent allies is hard to maintain on most maps though. 

28 minutes ago, Diovani Bressan said:

I decided to give him Chill Res because 3 of the 4 units in my infantry team are magic users: Nowi, Soren and Lucius.

Chill Res is cool on him. If your Arena bonus is physical, it won't help though. Better go with watersweep here to chip dragons. I mean there are two new armored dragons incoming ... 

[Diovani Bressan]

7 minutes ago, mampfoid said:

Chill Res is cool on him. If your Arena bonus is physical, it won't help though. Better go with watersweep here to chip dragons. I mean there are two new armored dragons incoming ... 

That's true! I forgot Soren has Watersweep. One of my problems with arena is attacking a foe with a unit which isn't the bonus units, because he/she can defeat the unit and I will lose 3 points, but with a sweep skill I will not double the enemy. Also, Watersweep is a 240 SP skill. Thanks for the tip!

[mampfoid]

Wow, managed to get a deathless/5 run giving Fjorm all 20 kills on my first try!

Score is 3720, only 1 point short of my all-time high-score (when Brave Celica was bonus unit), which should get me my 4th crown. Fjorm (+0 neutral, QR2, Bonfire and CD3 seal) killed L!Hectors, Faes, M!Grimas, Sheenas and took 0 damage from a +ATK +10 Zeglius with Bold Fighter (Black Luna didn't proc though). 

Also my first defense win arrived early today, last week I had 4 total, the week before 0. 

2 hours ago, Diovani Bressan said:

Thanks for the tip!

You are welcome! Hope it helps you getting all bonus kills next season. 

[Diovani Bressan]

2 minutes ago, mampfoid said:

Wow, managed to get a deathless/5 run giving Fjorm all 20 kills on my first try!

Score is 3720, only 1 point short of my all-time high-score (when Brave Celica was bonus unit), which should get me my 4th crown. Fjorm (+0 neutral, QR2, Bonfire and CD3 seal) killed L!Hectors, Faes, M!Grimas, Sheenas and took 0 damage from a +ATK +10 Zeglius with Bold Fighter (Black Luna didn't proc though). 

Also my first defense win arrived early today, last week I had 4 total, the week before 0. 

You are welcome! Hope it helps you getting all bonus kills next season. 

Wow! We got the same score: 3.720. I lost some points because we a not in water season anymore, but Soren now has G Duel Infantry, so got  some of the points I lost.

[mampfoid]

44 minutes ago, Diovani Bressan said:

Wow! We got the same score: 3.720. 

Ha funny, that's some parallelism.

Let's hope score inflation doesn't start yet. Armored dragons will probably raise the threshold. 

[MonkeyCheez3K]

The sad day has come, where I benched my favorite gal, my first 5*+10, Olivia in favor of comfortable scoring. Maybe she will be back with Red Duel Infantry, but I doubt it. Finally, I can just finish any run without deaths and I'll just stay in 20,5, or Top 3K, all thanks to the "wonderful" Green Duel Infantry and my excessive green pulling Soren. I can still slap three more merges onto my team and some more expensive skills if I so wish, but last week was a really easy climb and I didn't have to worry about the threshold at all. Soren is definitely some effective support. At least some benefits came out of this.

Still, I hate these Duel skills, and the worst part, they can't just get rid of them anymore, they are now in the pool. The scoring system cannot be changed as easily anymore. Farewell, Olivia, you shall be missed.

Edited October 9, 2018 by MonkeyCheez3K

[Diovani Bressan]

5 minutes ago, MonkeyCheez3K said:

Still, I hate these Duel skills, and the worst part, they can't just get rid of them anymore, they are now in the pool. The scoring system cannot be changed as easily anymore.

Imagivne the day when we get Colorless Duel Cavalry. Brave Lyns and Brave Veronicas everywhere!

[Ice Dragon]

23 minutes ago, Diovani Bressan said:

Imagivne the day when we get Colorless Duel Cavalry. Brave Lyns and Brave Veronicas everywhere!

Too bad it means they won't have a functional A-slot skill and armor Tiki and armor Myrrh will just breathe on them and they will die.

[Diovani Bressan]

3 minutes ago, Ice Dragon said:

Too bad it means they won't have a functional A-slot skill and armor Tiki and armor Myrrh will just breathe on them and they will die.

Maybe, but Pain+ Savage Blow can be dangerous even without a functional A-Slot.

[Alkaid]

36 minutes ago, MonkeyCheez3K said:

Still, I hate these Duel skills, and the worst part, they can't just get rid of them anymore, they are now in the pool. The scoring system cannot be changed as easily anymore. Farewell, Olivia, you shall be missed.

Yeah, that's what's really disappointing. IS decided to just dig the hole deeper rather than try to change how arena scoring works. I wish it could have been different, since maybe they could have also shifted away from pushing all these armor units for the sake of baiting arena whales.

[redlight]

Won't really bother with arena this month. Maybe AA will receive mild attention because coins. Kinda busy and arena is boring anyways when I have free time. I'd rather play Trails of Cold Steel than go through that crap. At least I'd be having fun

[Ice Dragon]

3 minutes ago, Diovani Bressan said:

Maybe, but Pain+ Savage Blow can be dangerous even without a functional A-Slot.

But ranged cavalry are easy to pull away from their buddies, Bold Fighter doesn't care about HP, and Duel means no Close Counter for Pain to cause problems on your player phase.

 

2 minutes ago, Alkaid said:

Yeah, that's what's really disappointing. IS decided to just dig the hole deeper rather than try to change how arena scoring works. I wish it could have been different, since maybe they could have also shifted away from pushing all these armor units for the sake of baiting arena whales.

They're going to be releasing more armor units whether people like them or not. Less than 10% of all units in the game right now are armored (25/297) (and we still won't even hit 10% with the Halloween banner (29/302)), and that means armor teams have shit for unit diversity compared to other compositions (fliers are actually in a similar situation since a huge number of them have almost the exact same stat distribution).

Hell, we right now, after more than one and a half years, have as many playable red armors in the game (6) as there were red tome users at launch (6) and we have fewer armors in the standard summoning pool now (11) than we had tome users in the standard summoning pool at launch (12). And tomes were notorious for having pretty much no diversity at launch.

[Alkaid]

12 minutes ago, Ice Dragon said:

They're going to be releasing more armor units whether people like them or not. Less than 10% of all units in the game right now are armored (25/297) (and we still won't even hit 10% with the Halloween banner (29/302)), and that means armor teams have shit for unit diversity compared to other compositions (fliers are actually in a similar situation since a huge number of them have almost the exact same stat distribution).

Hell, we right now, after more than one and a half years, have as many playable red armors in the game (6) as there were red tome users at launch (6) and we have fewer armors in the standard summoning pool now (11) than we had tome users in the standard summoning pool at launch (12). And tomes were notorious for having pretty much no diversity at launch.

Armors also have lower representation in the actual games, so it makes sense for there to be less in Heroes too. Same reason we get a disproportionate amount of infantry swords, since they're common in the games. But it's not like they really try to do much more than wait for seasonals/special banners to load up on those armor alts to fill in the gaps + bait whales due to the limited availability at the same time. I mean, 2 limited availability trainee dragon armors back to back to hit people in the wallet is pretty obvious what the main reason is. And in the end i all feeds into keeping arena in a stale armor meta. Selling people a "solution" with the Duel skills is pretty much a cop out when they drop multiple 180 BST units before their introductory banner even ends.

[Azuni]

9 hours ago, Ice Dragon said:

Since the next Arena bonus Heroes list is the Halloween banner, it looks like it'll be there to stay for three weeks if they want it to overlap with Halloween itself.

Spoiler

Not sure how legit this information is, but there was a thread mentioning that the newly datamined bonus Heroes set will remain for only two weeks.

https://www.reddit.com/r/FireEmblemHeroes/comments/9mp8i2/extra_findings_from_the_2100_update/

 

[Kuroi Tsubasa Tenshi]

1 hour ago, Alkaid said:

Armors also have lower representation in the actual games, so it makes sense for there to be less in Heroes too. Same reason we get a disproportionate amount of infantry swords, since they're common in the games. But it's not like they really try to do much more than wait for seasonals/special banners to load up on those armor alts to fill in the gaps + bait whales due to the limited availability at the same time. I mean, 2 limited availability trainee dragon armors back to back to hit people in the wallet is pretty obvious what the main reason is. And in the end i all feeds into keeping arena in a stale armor meta. Selling people a "solution" with the Duel skills is pretty much a cop out when they drop multiple 180 BST units before their introductory banner even ends.

I have to agree. Otherwise, where's Gatrie, Oswin or Wallace?

10 minutes ago, Azuni said:

  Reveal hidden contents

Not sure how legit this information is, but there was a thread mentioning that the newly datamined bonus Heroes set will remain for only two weeks.

https://www.reddit.com/r/FireEmblemHeroes/comments/9mp8i2/extra_findings_from_the_2100_update/

 

Given that this current rotation has lasted for three weeks, the chances of the one following also lasting as long as pretty much zero. I don't think it should really be a surprise to anyone, though, given that last year's Hallowe'en banner was grossly misaligned with the holiday proper.

[Hilda]

2 hours ago, Ice Dragon said:

But ranged cavalry are easy to pull away from their buddies, Bold Fighter doesn't care about HP, and Duel means no Close Counter for Pain to cause problems on your player phase.

That totally depends on the Healing skill the Cavalry healer is useing. If your Team runs some form of Ploy or Chill debuff, Restore+ keeps the Cavalry unit from running towards your units. So there is ways on healers to prevent that (my +10 Veronica uses Restore+)

[Ice Dragon]

1 hour ago, Alkaid said:

Armors also have lower representation in the actual games, so it makes sense for there to be less in Heroes too. Same reason we get a disproportionate amount of infantry swords, since they're common in the games.

Hence why we get so many seasonal armors. Heroes doesn't have to stick to the same distributions as the main series games and shouldn't stick to the same distribution because single-movement-type teams are supposed to exist in this game.

 

1 hour ago, Alkaid said:

Selling people a "solution" with the Duel skills is pretty much a cop out when they drop multiple 180 BST units before their introductory banner even ends.

Having a 180 stat total is entirely unnecessary to do well in the Arena. In terms of getting to and staying in Tier 21, whales have very little reason to actually pull for Myrrh. Tiki is actually useful because she's a Legendary Hero that isn't fire, but any Legendary armor with an earth element could take her place and do just as well.

Prior to Tiki's existence, I've been running teams in the 165-175 buckets without much issue, and really all Tiki does is let me run her with Swap instead of a Rally (from a scoring perspective; from a performance perspective, she's noticeably better than Hardin). To that effect, the Duel skills setting your stat bucket to 170 is perfectly sufficient.

What the Duel skills mean to me is that there's no Gen 3 planned for anytime in the foreseeable future, meaning that a stat total in the 170 bucket is probably going to remain competitive for a long enough time.

 

36 minutes ago, Kuroi Tsubasa Tenshi said:

I have to agree. Otherwise, where's Gatrie, Oswin or Wallace?

Not marketable.

 

36 minutes ago, Kuroi Tsubasa Tenshi said:

Given that this current rotation has lasted for three weeks, the chances of the one following also lasting as long as pretty much zero. I don't think it should really be a surprise to anyone, though, given that last year's Hallowe'en banner was grossly misaligned with the holiday proper.

Last year's banner was aligned so that the Arena bonus set containing the Halloween characters would land on Halloween itself.

Edited October 9, 2018 by Ice Dragon

[Kuroi Tsubasa Tenshi]

11 minutes ago, Ice Dragon said:

Not marketable.

 

Last year's banner was aligned so that the Arena bonus set containing the Halloween characters would land on Halloween itself.

Strongly disagree when those are characters people actually liked from the games, even if they aren't the most popular and the fact that IS has shown itself more than willing to do a banner of popular character alt, plus two second-stringers. Just do another Hector alt and throw in Oswin and Wallace alongside him.

Because everyone is totally going to get hyped on Hallowe'en itself to... have three seasons of Hallowe'en units last well into November instead of the usual mid-October hyping period for Hallowe'en itself? It's an utterly bizarre choice no matter how you slice it.

[Ice Dragon]

25 minutes ago, Kuroi Tsubasa Tenshi said:

Strongly disagree when those are characters people actually liked from the games, even if they aren't the most popular and the fact that IS has shown itself more than willing to do a banner of popular character alt, plus two second-stringers. Just do another Hector alt and throw in Oswin and Wallace alongside him.

Do you have an example? I went through every banner this year and every one has at least two marketable characters on it. I mean, you could instantly make Oswin or Wallace marketable by giving them good skills, but then you'd probably also get complaints of "why Oswin and Wallace when there are significantly more popular characters they could have picked?".

Though I totally wouldn't mind Bold Fighter or Vengeful Fighter dropping to the 4-star pool regardless of who it's on.

 

38 minutes ago, Kuroi Tsubasa Tenshi said:

Because everyone is totally going to get hyped on Hallowe'en itself to... have three seasons of Hallowe'en units last well into November instead of the usual mid-October hyping period for Hallowe'en itself? It's an utterly bizarre choice no matter how you slice it.

If we have three weeks of the Halloween characters this year, it'd be October 16 through November 5, which is nothing even close to "well into November". If we only have two weeks, it'd be October 16 through October 29, which awkwardly ends right before Halloween.