Your best & worst changes of 2018

[Diovani Bressan]

@TheWill @Vaximillian Yeah... A Lot of questionable alts... And this include units like Camilla, Tharja, Lyn, Kagero, Takumi, Xander...

[JSND Alter Dragon Boner]

@The Priest i would honestly add another issue for demotion

 

3* makes shit so bloated its a struggle to get good cheap fodders atm. FEH sadly happen to be one of few games a repetitive pulling of older units isnt exactly a bad thing since each new units are going to need Repos/Fury/C for their base performance. Much less of an issue for a pull and done units we recently got(Surtr literally only need Sol) but you get the idea

[Jingle Jangle]

2 hours ago, TheWill said:

 

 

2 hours ago, Vaximillian said:

It’s called hypocrisy.

For me, Summer Camilla and Winter Tharja were tame compared to some of the other alts this year. No need to be a prick about it.

[TheSilentChloey]

Best:

Coming back to heroes on a Chrom focus banner and getting him and M!Robin.  Having some good units to play with and of course Grimmy.

 

Sort of Okay:

The demotions making certain units easier to get.  Please IS make regular Lucina a 4 ☆ unit for God's sake.  Like seriously!  Then I would have need for f-ing feathers...

Aether Raids, which have now gone to whales of course...

 

The awful:

Where the hell is a permanent summoning banner?  Where are the less expensive ways to get heroes?  Why are orbs so difficult to get?

 

Also I am very salty I haven't got a regular Lucina or her spring variant...

[Vaximillian]

16 minutes ago, Jingle Bells said:

For me, Summer Camilla and Winter Tharja were tame compared to some of the other alts this year. No need to be a prick about it.

Naturally. You’re willing to overlook some but not the others because they are of the characters you like better. Nothing unexpected here.

[redlight]

13 minutes ago, Jingle Bells said:

 

For me, Summer Camilla and Winter Tharja were tame compared to some of the other alts this year. No need to be a prick about it.

If anything negative is said about you then just ignore it because what you might say in defense could bite you in the ass (this isn't on the top of that scale, but it is somewhere there). Saying "you're an asshole" could potentially spark heated responses and you'll do the same and the cycle goes on. I'm not picking sides, just saying that responding to dislike won't always have the best results depending on presentation

[Zapp Branniglenn]

I'm having a hard time remembering all the things that happened strictly in 2018. Legendary Heroes are technically a 2017 concept, but legendary heroes being generic alts of existing characters is a purely 2018 concept that we at first didn't immediately expect to be the norm moving forward. Well I WOULD like to at least give a honorable mention to Legendary Banners. They're loaded with units that are rare, insanely good, or both. And my collection has skyrocketed as a result of them. They also gave me hope I might collect all the Special Heroes I missed at a time where we had no concrete idea whether the first year of banners would be re-ran. Over the course of 2018 I began spending my orbs almost exclusively on these banners.

The Great

• Auto Battle enhancements. As my interest in this game waned, auto battle kept me participating in most events. And that feather and orb income kept me adding to my collection which is the only concern of mine regarding this game.

The Good

• Rival Domains. A lot of us wondered if we'd ever get to enjoy using more than four of our favorite characters in this game, and this was the answer. Once I had one of each weapon type at five star, I felt like I was finished when it came to building my army in 2017, but now there's a need for many more units of various movement classes.
• Grand Conquests. All the goodness of Rival Domains but in a competitive mode. Rival Domains takes a lot of mechanic ideas that I had to shake up the standard Voting Gauntlet. 
• Hero Rises Poll. Any one of those four units would have been new to my collection except for Hector and I wouldn't have said no to the still elusive Distant Counter fodder. But I also acknowledge that this could have gone much worse for me. For one, I never pulled another Legendary Ike, so that freebie has pulled more than worth his weight on my team.
• Seasonal banners. There are way too many of these a year and yeah I don't care for them besides checking off their name in my Catalogue. But 2018 is the year they moved away from the Fates/Awakening cast and that helped us detox from the flood of alts. It also let us justify getting New Heroes of Fates and Awakening
• GHB Elite rotations and Heroic Grails copies. It's nice to max merge these GHB and TT units.

The Bad

• Colored Bows. I'm not mad at the unnecessary-ness of this inclusion so much as I'm mad at them taking away potential units that would have served as colorless Legendaries. What happened with F!Grima is unacceptable.
• Voting Gauntlet. Obviously not a 2018 mode, but the unwillingness to change is pretty bad. This mode is extremely flawed and would be made much better if you had two "charges" each hour to do battles. "Competing" in this mode is based entirely on punctuality and that's just not engaging. I can't pull up my phone twice every waking hour of the day, and I don't live in Japan to take advantage of the pre-Same Hell multipliers. When you miss the first multiplier in the last eight hours, it sucks. And if you played on the team that doesn't ever get multipliers it's even worse. This mode only exists to be exploited.
• Divine Dew income. They're giving us way too many enhancable prfs and not enough dew to try out a sizable fraction of them. They eventually realized they could give us Dew without giving us Stones, but the amounts are still poor. One of these days I'll have to promote somebody to five star just so I could spend Stones on all of their refinements in order to get Dew. Please give us a way to convert Stones directly to Dew so we avoid that scenario.

 

Edited December 15, 2018 by Glennstavos

[Rezzy]

On 12/14/2018 at 9:54 AM, Cute Chao said:

Best: Combat Manuals

Worst: Ratio of male : female seasonals on banners, especially since this doesn't look to be changing at any point.

Pretty much this, getting really tired on this ratio in both regular and seasonal banners

 

I'll add another for each

Best: Unit demotions (We need another round of them.  I say all launch 5*s should be demoted)

Worst: Ever increasing power creep.

[Shiki]

@JSND Alter Dragon Boner
Yeah, that's true as well. Mass Demotion is a short-term solution at best and the consequence is bloating up the low-rarity pool. Nonetheless the 5*-only pool is in a dire need for a clean-up as well.
Mass demotions wouldn't even be bad in that regard if there would be more Heroes with those cheap skills. e.g. only Selena and Barst have Reposition, Quick Riposte is still a 5* unlock since launch. Doesn't help that most 4* unlock only have a single representative (Shanna for Desperation, almost every Hone/Fortify/Goad/Ward skill etc.).
Then we have utter garbage like Arthur or Raigh that are so worthless for even minor SI and pretty much become feathers immediately.

@Rezzy
I would go so far that almost every Gen 1 5* can be demoted at this point. There are so many underwhelming or powercrept 5* from that generation like Sanaki, Eldigan, LUKE or Mist.
There should be some exceptions though (e.g. Hector, Amelia, CYL1).

[bottlegnomes]

3 hours ago, The Priest said:

Eldigan, LUKE or Mist.
There should be some exceptions though (e.g. Hector, Amelia, CYL1).

To me at least, Eldigan is the most egregious. Luke and Mist at least have the potential for bonkers refinements. Eldigan's best build is literally inferior Ares, and the addition of Bartre's refinement, just drives the point home, having arguably a better, or at least more anti-meta, second effect.

I could actually see Lucina and Roy dropping. They wouldn't be prime candidates, but they have decent case. Roy is one of a billion sword cavs, and while still quite decent, arguably among the worse of the actually decent ones. Lucina is a very solid mixed phase lance unit, but beyond that, all she really has as unique is being a buffbot, which a lot of other units can do anymore. Even Ike is really only because of Steady Breath, which I don't think would be that heinous. Lyn definit because I don't think anyone wants to see as many +10 Lyns as we do Reinhardts.

Anyway, mine.

Best: Combat Manuals, Grails, demotions

Worst: Powercreep, "over- balancing" certain unit types, arena changes, Aether raids + changes (seem like they'd be more fun if they weren't so competitive).

Edited December 16, 2018 by bottlegnomes

[XRay]

3 hours ago, bottlegnomes said:

Aether raids + changes (seem like they'd be more fun if they weren't so competitive).

In my opinion, at least for me, there is less pressure to do well in Aether Raids, as the difference in rewards is a lot less pronounced compared to Arena. For Tier 21 Arena players, they get 20% more Orbs compared to Tier 20 players. In Aether raids, top players only get about 10% more Grails compared to me.

I agree that they should decouple the Grail and Orb rewards from rankings and just have them be based on participation, similar to Tempest Trials. That way, players who are not a fan of PvP do not feel as much pressure to do spend too much effort on those modes. Players can still play for rank for less valuable resources like Feathers and Aether Stones and I think it is fine to give top ranking players a little more of those resources.

Edited December 16, 2018 by XRay

[Roflolxp54]

The good:
Combat Manuals
Free Summon Tickets
Daily GHB map rotation
Daily Special Training map rotation
Heroic Grails
GHBs, LHBs, BHBs no longer costing stamina
Arena tier 21
Accessories

The bad:
Arena becoming Cheerleader Arena
Addition of Mythic Heroes
Relay Defense

The ugly:
IS's general inability to add gamemodes that DON'T involve competition of some sort. We pretty much have the following gamemodes that have a ranking system of some sort:
Arena
Arena Assault
Voting Gauntlet
Tempest Trials (the only PvE mode)
Grand Conquests
Aether Raids

[bottlegnomes]

9 hours ago, XRay said:

In my opinion, at least for me, there is less pressure to do well in Aether Raids, as the difference in rewards is a lot less pronounced compared to Arena. For Tier 21 Arena players, they get 20% more Orbs compared to Tier 20 players. In Aether raids, top players only get about 10% more Grails compared to me.

I agree that they should decouple the Grail and Orb rewards from rankings and just have them be based on participation, similar to Tempest Trials. That way, players who are not a fan of PvP do not feel as much pressure to do spend too much effort on those modes. Players can still play for rank for less valuable resources like Feathers and Aether Stones and I think it is fine to give top ranking players a little more of those resources.

I guess as far as competitive, I don't so much mean actual rankings, so much as encouraging the need to prevent others from doing well. For AR, think about how much more fun it'd be if it was more or less just a map maker mode where there weren't penalties for losing on either side, e.g. you could attempt a map as many times as you like and people besting you map didn't penalize you. People would be a lot more prone to actually make maps thy find fun instead of just following the same patterns to optimize obnoxiousness.

[XRay]

1 hour ago, bottlegnomes said:

I guess as far as competitive, I don't so much mean actual rankings, so much as encouraging the need to prevent others from doing well. For AR, think about how much more fun it'd be if it was more or less just a map maker mode where there weren't penalties for losing on either side, e.g. you could attempt a map as many times as you like and people besting you map didn't penalize you. People would be a lot more prone to actually make maps thy find fun instead of just following the same patterns to optimize obnoxiousness.

I personally do not mind the difficulty. Whether you lose lift or not on defense would not really change things in my opinion, as players still have an incentive to make maps difficult to prevent other players from gaining Lift and scoring higher than them.

I would much rather be penalized for bad play than be constrained by something stupid like BST. I hate the BST crap in Arena because I am penalized for using better tactics while players who have worse game play than me can still outrank me for running higher scoring teams.

[bottlegnomes]

21 minutes ago, XRay said:

as players still have an incentive to make maps difficult to prevent other players from gaining Lift and scoring higher than them.

That's what I meant by losing on either side. If it weren't so directly competitive, then people wouldn't care about rankings then the maps might have more variety. Then again, I'm of the opinion that FE isn't particularly suited for PvP after having seen all its attempts.

I do agree on the BST stuff.

[Lewyn]

Good

Aether raids- Renewed my passion for the game and I think the best mode by far.  It has problems and favors whales but it is a much better competitive mode than arena.  Also building defense maps is a lot of fun and one can encounter many different buildings/formations.  

Combat Manuals- I am naturally a hoarder IRL and in this game.  I never want to send someone home who even has a small chance of being useful in the future.  Just an immense relief, summoning sessions aren't nearly as stressful and I never fear of running out of space.

Heroic grails- The free units, some of them have rare 5 star locked skills which besides whales are hard for many people to get much of through summoning.  Then some of the free units are actually really good and/or unique and this is a way to get merges on them.  

Free summon tickets- Doesn't need explanation

Unit quality- Generally units on banners are more worth getting than 2017, most of them have better statlines and seem to come with skills that make sense.  There are quite a few that come almost completely built and set to go.

Bad

Duel skills- Yes this allows one to run lower BST units but it closes off them changing Arena scoring in the future.  BST will always be a part, which sucks IMO

Alts on legendary banners- These banners hyped me so much not just cause of the no off focus pity breakers and high rate, but more that we were getting original characters as legendary heroes.  It seemed to foretell a bright future of more original characters and maybe NPC characters from the main series.  Instead they alts got their dirty polluting hands on this banner also usually using heroes that already have multiple alts already.  

Alts on new hero banners- When the game started alts were limited to seasonal banners, and not being a fan and much preferring new characters being added I was fine.  At least could look forward to new hero banners which would add to the cast, many times 4 units sometimes even more.  Of course such bliss couldn't last and they decided to start putting at least one alt on just about every new hero banner of 2018.  You a fan of side characters or ones that aren't the most popular from their games?  You'll likely be waiting a long time or maybe forever to see them.