Aether Raids General Thread

[Kuroi Tsubasa Tenshi]

"Success!" "Your opponent won the rematch!" Choose one, game (it was actually a successful defense, but I guess something's a little glitchy with their message code).

6080 Lift is currently #542. Can't lose any more Lift because I already took a hit very late last night (annoyingly, that successful defense was my second one, with my first being a failure with one kill on the attackers).

[Usana]

So I just faced a diabolical defense. But I managed to pull through in the end.

I know. I can't believe I won either.

 

So the question is are they just generous or did they just simply give up and figure it wasn't worth it to make other folks work for the win.

[Ice Dragon]

16 minutes ago, Usana said:

So I just faced a diabolical defense. But I managed to pull through in the end.

I actually ran into a more... sinister... version of this map last week.

Move Athena to the right of the Fortress, then move the Fortress down 1 square, then move both Aether resources behind Athena and the Fortress. Then replace Athena with Wrys.

It's physically impossible to hit the Aether resource in the corner unless you have a unit with Drag Back or Lunge and can avoid killing Wrys. Or you have a melee unit with Pass.

Edited December 2, 2018 by Ice Dragon

[Maaka]

Looks like I'm ending at 6,320 lift this season. Got screwed over super hard by defense RNG. All my worst matches were the first ones, so lost a total of 520 lift from the 7 losses... Oh well, still in the top ranks. Hopefully next week will be a bit better. It was nice having lots of defense matches to gather info from, even if most of them used double or even triple dancers to take out my team.

[Roflolxp54]

Rip 380 Lift. Initially made it to tier 16 but a defense loss put me back down to tier 15.

[Jingle Jangle]

My AA rank this week is 69,289. I blame all of the careless positioning I have done this week.

[mampfoid]

Like last season, I'm 20 lift short of the next tier. Plus I just fell out of the 30k bracket ... wow, I should pay more attention to this mode. 

[DehNutCase]

R.I.P. top 3k, that'll learn me to grab pots when I have 30 aether to spare.

(I lost 3 units because I was just shoving units forward on auto-pilot to grab pots.)

 

Not quite sure how far I'll keep dropping while playing casually, but from what I've seen it seems pretty unlikely that I'll ever drop out of top 10k unless I decide to go full casual and just play 5 days a week. (Which I am thinking about doing, mind.)

[Othin]

So by ending at 5,920, I think my net lift gain for the season is 1,120. (1,480 gained, 360 lost to defense fights.)

Aether costs are continuing to increase, but if I can pull off another 900 next week, I'll be able to get into Tier 17. After that, a week each for 18 and 19, then... 20 and 21 seem pretty fucking hard to get. 19 > 20 is 1,200, which is reasonable, but 20 > 21 continues to be completely absurd.

[Qilin]

Apparently I made it to rank 27489.

I think the final day's first defense was a success is why, but I cannot check it now.

[Azuni]

Ended at ~6620, so safe for starting at T17 next season. Apparently, according to a friend who is on Page2, there was only about ~57 people who have a score of 6500+ to start in T17 after reset.

[Zeo]

Ended at 21k this time. Guess it could be worse. I failed 2 offense runs this week. One today and one yesterday. Today I had it in the bag and could finish Rein with Genny, but I thought I had one more turn and went for the pots instead only to see a game over screen immediately after. The time before that I tried to use swap on Inigo with Matthew so he could bait Reinhardt but forgot he still had a double rally from arena, so Matt bit the bullet and died.

[Ice Dragon]

6,020 Lift put me at rank 929. I got lazy and missed my free run on Friday and also suffered a loss by being overly cautious, but it looks like it didn't really matter.

I would have won that one, too, if they let you have the enemy phase on the last turn (though several of my defense wins have been due to the enemy not getting an enemy phase on the last turn, so I probably shouldn't complain too much).

[Azuris]

Missed tier 17 this week, but with the amount of people that made it, it wouldn't be a correct representation of my low merged units and my abilities to get in there. As long as I can somehow sneak into top 3k I am really happy.

 

13 hours ago, Alkaid said:

It's a good thing I had that 80 lift buffer, since I already got my defense loss for the day and I end at exactly 6000.

Nice job, congratulations. Good to see you didn't let your bad luck last week discourage you and you even caught back up to most people who started ahead of you.

Do you happen to remember your rank? Would be interesting to know approximately how many people will start at tier 16.

 

2 hours ago, Azuni said:

Ended at ~6620, so safe for starting at T17 next season. Apparently, according to a friend who is on Page2, there was only about ~57 people who have a score of 6500+ to start in T17 after reset.

Oh you must be the Azuni I keep seeing on the top players page. To finish that high requires an excellent performance in both offense and defense. Congratulations, you earned yourself a really nice starting spot for some weeks as getting up more than one tier will become hard and then impossible the next seasons.

 

[Alkaid]

7 minutes ago, Azuris said:

Nice job, congratulations. Good to see you didn't let your bad luck last week discourage you and you even caught back up to most people who started ahead of you.

Do you happen to remember your rank? Would be interesting to know approximately how many people will start at tier 16.

I was really lucky to land exactly on the minimum needed. I managed to not mess up any matches and get all but a couple aether structures, so I'm glad the defense losses didn't spoil that. Sorry you didn't make it to tier 17. It seems like that would have been a hefty feat this week.

I just collected my rewards and I was 1,077.

[Johann]

I'm strongly considering spending my stones on an extra Defense slot, as I've been doing fine with just 4 on my Offense team, but my Defense results have been mostly poor.

[Azuris]

25 minutes ago, Alkaid said:

I was really lucky to land exactly on the minimum needed. I managed to not mess up any matches and get all but a couple aether structures, so I'm glad the defense losses didn't spoil that.

You started with a 400 lift penalty and played a nearly perfect offense, so it is well earned, it would have been unfair if the quality of the attacking players and the timings of the attacks would have ruined that.

 

29 minutes ago, Alkaid said:

Sorry you didn't make it to tier 17. It seems like that would have been a hefty feat this week.

Haha, you don't need to be sorry, I was 120 lift off, so it wasn't that close. Also rank 87 is still way better than I deserve.

 

31 minutes ago, Alkaid said:

I just collected my rewards and I was 1,077.

Thank you. That is actually fewer people than I thought, so it's still a nice head start for us to reach top 3k again.

[Azuni]

14 hours ago, Azuris said:

Oh you must be the Azuni I keep seeing on the top players page. To finish that high requires an excellent performance in both offense and defense. Congratulations, you earned yourself a really nice starting spot for some weeks as getting up more than one tier will become hard and then impossible the next seasons.

 

Yeah, that's me, thanks :>  It was more RNG than anything, I was only attacked on 3-4 days, for a total of -200 via defense losses. Offense also feels RNG-heavy at times since not everyone is forced to fight the truly dangerous teams.

IIRC it's already near impossible to go from T17 to T19 this week (requires +1700 with no defense losses, while last week was 1700 max with lower aether costs), so yeah this should be a more relaxing week on offense.
Might ignore getting the Panic Manor O since perfect offense isn't required to gain a net 700 score this week, which would let me get the 5th defense slot at the end of the season.

[DehNutCase]

In retrospect, I should've just gone 'fuck it' and played with my main team from day one.

(My main team crushes everything in this mode.)

But I didn't get to do that until recently because I need to run a 5th unit as bonus if I wanted to run my main team, so whatever.

Edit: Like, everything is so much easier when I'm comfortable enough with the team to do stuff like this all the time. (It was a 5 unit team, so I crushed it with this---it's only a 2 turn clear because I needed to break rocks.)

Double Edit: Okay I'm having way too much fun styling on people.

Edited December 4, 2018 by DehNutCase

[SatsumaFSoysoy]

I've tried to stay positive about this mode but fuck it. I've run into too many cancer teams/maps these few days. Not even having a fifth slot is helping.

This mode is just too much right now. And all for a measly 90 Grails a week max. Might as well take it slower.

Edited December 4, 2018 by SatsumaFSoysoy

[LordFrigid]

I put Faye on one of my offensive raiding parties.

So worth it.

[Ice Dragon]

2 hours ago, LordFrigid said:

I put Faye on one of my offensive raiding parties.

So worth it.

I've been wanting to, but I refuse to use rocks to get a Guard Bow for her. But I have Legendary Lyn to play that part for the time being.

[DehNutCase]

9 hours ago, SatsumaFSoysoy said:

This mode is just too much right now. And all for a measly 90 Grails a week max. Might as well take it slower.

Mind that it'll probably be best to bounce between tiers 17 and 18 if you want to take things slow, at T19 6 unit defense teams unlock and I'm pretty sure we'll be stuck with 5 unit offense teams, meaning T19 is when the real cancer starts.

Right now teams are honestly still at the 'easy mode' stage where most people are only running 4 units, so you should get your easy tier ups while you can. (Since it's a lot easier to keep a tier than to get into a higher one.)

[SatsumaFSoysoy]

2 minutes ago, DehNutCase said:

Mind that it'll probably be best to bounce between tiers 17 and 18 if you want to take things slow, at T19 6 unit defense teams unlock and I'm pretty sure we'll be stuck with 5 unit offense teams, meaning T19 is when the real cancer starts.

Right now teams are honestly still at the 'easy mode' stage where most people are only running 4 units, so you should get your easy tier ups while you can. (Since it's a lot easier to keep a tier than to get into a higher one.)

If it's easy mode right now, then I guess this will be unplayable soon.

[DehNutCase]

1 minute ago, SatsumaFSoysoy said:

If it's easy mode right now, then I guess this will be unplayable soon.

Yeah... performance based scoring systems* are pretty much only for die-hard fanatics like me, and even I don't enjoy the mode as much as, say, Tactics Drills. (I don't mind the difficulty of the mode, really, I mind the fact that unlike basically every other fire emblem, you get punished hard even if you restart the map after losing.)

*Since performance based scoring is what brings out the actual cancer teams out of the woodwork---if I didn't lose lift on defense I'd be fine running easyish defense teams like melee flying teams rather than my CC Vantage Rein & Leo combo (Leo's in there to snipe the people who think TA Raven Cecilia counters horses).