Special Heroes (Gifts of Winter)

[NSSKG151]

It has been a while since I posted anything FEH related though for the last six weeks there really nothing interesting related to the game. Anyways, they made some interesting choices for Christmas units this year though sadly all of them are armors again. Also, I knew we would eventually get an armored staff unit. I recall someone telling me off once here on sereneforest that armored staff wouldn't happen but look what we have now. Also surprised to see only three units here but I suppose the bridal and new years banners also only had three units.

Usually I don't pull for seasonal but I am considering only pulling for Eirika since she got great art once again and she is the only character I like here since I could care less about Ephraim and armor trainee dragon bst Fae (plus pulling colorless might give me the final three copies of Kaze I need to +10 him). All we need now is Brave Eirika with either a blue or green weapon and you could make a viable team of just Eirika and her alts.

 

[Garlyle]

First of all, I love this - they all look gorgeous.

Second, nice touch with the exclamation mark on the new skills.

Fae, I called it. She might be the 3rd 180 bst dragon unit, and she is very supportive on defense. Probably will pick her. Ephraim prefers to go solo again, not sure how I feel about it. As for Eirika, she supports the strongest unit on your team, and also...

FIRST ARMORED HEALER. Get ready for it guys, although it might not change much.

[Hilda]

4 hours ago, silveraura25 said:

I'm not sure about this, but @Ice Dragon being an armor unit as a healer is bad, right? B skill conflict

dont worry they will fix this, they will release dazzling staff as a sacred seal so Armorers can continue being busted and people pull for Eirika, although her Best B-Slot will be Wary Fighter combined with Martyr. Besides she will prolly have 170 BST! Besides you better slap Wary Fighter on her and give her Martyr as a healing skill + Absorb as a Staff and Live to Serve. Impenetrable wall that constantly autoheals itself when healing a bunch of Allys that run Wary fighter too and are called Surtr!

10 bucks armored Fae will have 185 BST! (because you know people need to pull for higher BST!)

 

I gave this banner an instant dislike.

And Eirika will brake the game together with Surtr because a Team of Wary Fighter Armorers with Goads is basicly unkillable because Eirika can heal her allies and if she wants herself with one simple skill: Martyr, maeking it possible for her to run Wary Fighter too! (If you want to be more fancy give her Live to serve as a Sacred Seal, if you want to be even more Fancy Absorb so she can AoE auto heal when she attacks).

[redlight]

And my reason to pull Fae is gone. Water Breath is a thing

[Hilda]

1 minute ago, Garlyle said:

First of all, I love this - they all look gorgeous.

Second, nice touch with the exclamation mark on the new skills.

Fae, I called it. She might be the 3rd 180 bst dragon unit, and she is very supportive on defense. Probably will pick her. Ephraim prefers to go solo again, not sure how I feel about it. As for Eirika, she supports the strongest unit on your team, and also...

FIRST ARMORED HEALER. Get ready for it guys, although it might not change much.

oh please every whale allready got Surtr who has a personal weapon and a personal C-Skill. She will have 185 BST dont kid yourself

[Mau]

Oh shit it really is armored dragon Fae and SHE'S ADORABLE! Though I cry for my orbs, I am really happy that I can complete the armored dragon team now and that it mostly consists of cuties :D

I was also hoping for Eirika and Ephraim cause they're in my top 10 of least liked units, so I can skip them and save orbs :P Them getting alts so shortly after their previous alts is meh though, there's so many other units they could've picked like you know, poor altless Alm. Though Alm I probably would've wanted to summon so still glad he isn't here.

Ok so last year I was really happy with all christmas units being armored, cause armors were actually quite rare back then and especially good-looking ones. So Winter Lissa was a gift from heaven back then and she's been on my main armor team since. But....we got plenty of them now IS, you can stop now. Fae is cool cause a full armored dragon team is now possible (though she should've been colorless to really complete the set) but we really didn't need another blue armor (especially not in the form of Ephraim who just got an armored alt). And an armored healer is just disgusting pls, armors are already hard to kill in one hit and now full armor teams are gonna be able to heal every little damage you do to them too, why would you do this.

Dagger Cecilia hmm. It really depends on her art if I like her cause her current art is not my thing at all. That said, TT units are usually not the best and dagger units are also not the best so the chance that she's any good is pretty small. Here's hoping she at least has some good fodder.

[DehNutCase]

3 hours ago, Othin said:

They made an arena where BST doesn't matter, but somehow it's ended up getting a lot of complaints.

The worst thing about being bad is knowing you're bad.

The problem isn't that there are Aether Raids teams that stump people, it's that they know there are other players out there who have no trouble with those maps. The replay feature is a good tool to learn from, for example, but it's the worst thing in the world for people who didn't realize they were bad.

 

And as is Aether Raids is even more centralizing than Arena---there are at least options to how you want to stack 40 merges and a bunch of expensive skills*---but 2-3 Eir and 2-3 blessed is mandatory for 160 lift/fight. So you basically have the worst of both worlds.

*I don't do it myself because 1 orb/week is not worth it. If we literally only got 4 orbs a week maybe I'd consider it, but we get more like ~80 orbs/week.

[Hilda]

4 minutes ago, DehNutCase said:

The worst thing about being bad is knowing you're bad.

The problem isn't that there are Aether Raids teams that stump people, it's that they know there are other players out there who have no trouble with those maps. The replay feature is a good tool to learn from, for example, but it's the worst thing in the world for people who didn't realize they were bad.

 

And as is Aether Raids is even more centralizing than Arena---there are at least options to how you want to stack 40 merges and a bunch of expensive skills*---but 2-3 Eir and 2-3 blessed is mandatory for 160 lift/fight. So you basically have the worst of both worlds.

*I don't do it myself because 1 orb/week is not worth it. If we literally only got 4 orbs a week maybe I'd consider it, but we get more like ~80 orbs/week.

well in anycase after christmas banner all you need to run is 5 times Eirka healer to prevent anyone from penetrating your defense. If i predict IS correctly Eirika will have 175 BST If she has a stat spread of 42 33 14 39 45 it will be near impossible to kill that Team in 7 turns without running Armor smashing weapons in Aether raids.

Slap Ward Armor on all of them, slap Wary Fighter on all of them, slap fortress def/res, slap Miracle on all of them, slap Martyr on all of them and if possible Witchy Wand on all of them etc.. Even a Raven tome user wont do much to them, and noone outside of Bold Fighter and Null Follow up will be able to double/quad them because there is no staff breaker skill!

[DehNutCase]

5 minutes ago, Hilda said:

well in anycase after christmas banner all you need to run is 5 times Eirka healer to prevent anyone from penetrating your defense. If i predict IS correctly Eirika will have 175 BST If she has a stat spread of 42 33 14 39 45 it will be near impossible to kill that Team in 7 turns without running Armor smashing weapons in Aether raids.

Slap Ward Armor on all of them, slap Wary Fighter on all of them, slap fortress def/res, slap Miracle on all of them, slap Martyr on all of them and if possible Witchy Wand on all of them etc.. Even a Raven tome user wont do much to them, and noone outside of Bold Fighter and Null Follow up will be able to double/quad them because there is no staff breaker skill!

Eirika spam is actually fairly trivial to destroy. And without using Armor Effectiveness---if you're playing 'seriously' you have to assume that all an effective weapon does is force the optimal enemy to run Svalinn Shield in the A-slot rather than something else. You'll keep one in your 5 teams as a 'threat,' but it won't be the one doing the most work.

 

I'd personally use something like my Cordelia and just Galeforce them to death, but the 'textbook' answer is just to bring a pain staffer with double Savage Blow and run them all through.

Edit: Since we're running 3 Eirs + 2 Blessed though it'll probably just be a pair of Bold Fighter armors with a good special.

Edited December 16, 2018 by DehNutCase

[Hilda]

1 minute ago, DehNutCase said:

Eirika spam is actually fairly trivial to destroy. And without using Armor Effectiveness---if you're playing 'seriously' you have to assume that all an effective weapon does is force the optimal enemy to run Svalinn Shield in the A-slot rather than something else. You'll keep one in your 5 teams as a 'threat,' but it won't be the one doing the most work.

 

I'd personally use something like my Cordelia and just Galeforce them to death, but the 'textbook' answer is just to bring a pain staffer with double Savage Blow and run them all through.

lol i run a +10 Azama on my Aether raid defense teams and he has no Wary Fighter or Ward Armors as buffs and needs to be ganged up by 2-3 (one of them being a dancer) to be killed. You can annoy and stall people without needing to deal dmg. Eirika is like 5x Azama +10 and will have compared to him prolly decent attack. You can built that 5 Eirika Team up so they will run out of Turns to beat your Team. Trust me.

Not even your galeforce Cordelia will be able to penetrate that wall if the Team is built correctly in 7 turns.

[redlight]

The more I think about the less I want to spend orbs on this banner. Yeah, I'll pass. As cool as Eirika's staff is we already got better ways of getting defensive buffs

Edited December 16, 2018 by silveraura25

[DehNutCase]

50 minutes ago, Hilda said:

lol i run a +10 Azama on my Aether raid defense teams and he has no Wary Fighter or Ward Armors as buffs and needs to be ganged up by 2-3 (one of them being a dancer) to be killed. You can annoy and stall people without needing to deal dmg. Eirika is like 5x Azama +10 and will have compared to him prolly decent attack. You can built that 5 Eirika Team up so they will run out of Turns to beat your Team. Trust me.

Not even your galeforce Cordelia will be able to penetrate that wall if the Team is built correctly in 7 turns.

My Cordelia has Savage Blow. Her job isn't to kill you with stats (although she could---if I brought her in it's because it's a 5 flier team with 4 or more goads), it's to spread savage blow. Same for the pain staffer.

Realize you're talking about 6 Eirika teams inside a meta where 70 def/res units with 90 hp is easily obtainable. Any offensive unit worth running will have ways to wall break.

 

Like, people always talk like the AI is better at stacking buffs than the player for some god damn reason. If the AI has more stats than you you're playing and building teams like actual garbage.

[NoirCore]

4 hours ago, XRay said:

I think it is more of their failure to communicate and slowness to act. They generally do seem to listen to feed back based on their actions, but if they are better at communicating with us and giving us development news and updates, we as players would be much more understanding and patient. They are also abysmally slow at implementing changes, especially in regards to New Heroes Foci where many players want more equal representation from certain games. While I do not care about equal representation, I do care about their ability to satisfy players and how well they do as a business; if they cannot even speed up the Foci development process after almost 2 years since launch, there is something seriously wrong with management and it makes me less optimistic about the future of Fire Emblem.

Didn't they mention when they dropped the news about when we're getting RD and BiB units that units surprisingly take some months to actually develop? Should you take their word for it, that's probably the slowness they're talking about. Obviously, we're not necessarily sure why the units take as long in the first place or why stuff seems set in stone when they plan it, but I'm not gonna pretend that they're wizards or anything like that.

[ZeManaphy]

Surprised that there's only 3 units instead of 4. I'm not terribly interested aside from Ephraim and Erika's and voice actors and art.  Not to mention that I wish Alm and Celica would get their alts, considering they placed high on CYL. Probably gonna stick to the original Christmas banner.

[DefyingFates]

8 hours ago, silveraura25 said:

Anyways, RIP CYL Eirika

 

8 hours ago, Sunwoo said:

Also, Eirika's definitely not getting top 2 in CYL3 anymore. Also dammit, I didn't want to pull on this banner but armored staff and Eirika.

Shut your mouths, shut your mouths right now!!

Seriously though, I'm furious. Eirika's adorable and her kit is really interesting (just give her a Spd Tactic seal and she can almost fully buff any Bladetome unit), but they just had to make this right before CYL3, didn't they?  This is an Eiricav situation all over again, are they intentionally doing this to make sure at least one 3DS/ Heroes girl wins each year? I mean, I don't want to say they're intentionally sabotaging her, but...

---

Anyway, I'm not a fan of the armours either, but eh. As long as I stay in and around T18 in Arena I'm fine. Also, I guess everyone expecting a healer!Eirika was right, but this isn't the alt we wanted...

[mampfoid]

Armors again.

Will spend some orbs on hero fest instead. Probably will spend max 50 orbs on this banner to get a bonus unit for TTs and Arena eventually, but won't press it. 

[Othin]

7 hours ago, SuperNova125 said:

Do we know the odds for the banner yet? Also what are the odds for getting Tharja when sniping in red for the previous banner?

This banner:

Previous banner:

[XRay]

5 hours ago, NoirCore said:

Didn't they mention when they dropped the news about when we're getting RD and BiB units that units surprisingly take some months to actually develop?

That announcement is good, but that is only one announcement. In my opinion, those kinds of announcements should be happening much more frequently, like at least once or twice a month to address concerns players have.

For example, lots of players are complaining about the proliferation of ponies and Dancers/Singers in Aether Raids, how are they going to address that? What about players who want to keep the current system? I would much rather face ponies and Dancers/Singers in Aether Raids than having to deal with stupid BST crap.

5 hours ago, NoirCore said:

Should you take their word for it, that's probably the slowness they're talking about. Obviously, we're not necessarily sure why the units take as long in the first place or why stuff seems set in stone when they plan it, but I'm not gonna pretend that they're wizards or anything like that.

That announcement helps increase our patience, but it did not address why they are so freaking slow. I am not expecting the employees to be wizards, but I expect management to do their fucking jobs and find ways to speed up the process. Management has almost 2 years to do that, and I have not seen any improvement. Even if they did improve, they should at least communicate that to players.

This is just my speculation, but I think management is being stingy and keeping the staff small. If they would just come out and say that, it would let players know what is going on and we would be more understanding.

[Othin]

2 minutes ago, XRay said:

That announcement helps increase our patience, but it did not address why they are so freaking slow. I am not expecting the employees to be wizards, but I expect management to do their fucking jobs and find ways to speed up the process. Management has almost 2 years to do that, and I have not seen any improvement. Even if they did improve, they should at least communicate that to players.

This is just my speculation, but I think management is being stingy and keeping the staff small. If they would just come out and say that, it would let players know what is going on and we would be more understanding.

There are two assumptions here: production time wasn't even slower in the past, and there's actually a viable way to meaningfully speed up production time. I don't see any reason to believe either. Making games is a slow process.

"We move slow because we don't want to pay more staff" isn't the sort of thing companies say in their announcements, true or not. They've made it clear that this is the speed Heroes moves, and it's a fine speed. There are issues with the things they're choosing to make, but the time they're taking to make them and their unwillingness to hand out every internal detail you personally want are not reasonable complaints.

[XRay]

5 minutes ago, Othin said:

There are two assumptions here: production time wasn't even slower in the past, and there's actually a viable way to meaningfully speed up production time. I don't see any reason to believe either. Making games is a slow process.

"We move slow because we don't want to pay more staff" isn't the sort of thing companies say in their announcements, true or not. They've made it clear that this is the speed Heroes moves, and it's a fine speed. There are issues with the things they're choosing to make, but the time they're taking to make them and their unwillingness to hand out every internal detail you personally want are not reasonable complaints.

As a publicly traded company, it is not unreasonable for people to demand to know why things are going slow, at least if the company is an American company. Investors need to know what the hell is going on in the business. If they are not going to announce it in the game, they should at least put a little more information in their report to their stockholders. Not sure if you paid attention to Nintendo's stock price when Pokémon Go was released, but it sky rocketed the company's stock for a little while, only to have it drop back down to a more reasonable level when investors realized that Nintendo is not behind the development of the game. If Nintendo was more transparent and better at communicating, the stock would not have taken such a steep a roller coaster ride.

Slowness is a reasonable complaint and they are not making the game from scratch anymore. While I do not have much experience with other gacha games, Runescape (at least in the past, not sure about it now), StarCraft II, and Over Watch seem to be able to implement changes much quicker.

[Ice Dragon]

8 hours ago, Hilda said:

dont worry they will fix this, they will release dazzling staff as a sacred seal so Armorers can continue being busted and people pull for Eirika, although her Best B-Slot will be Wary Fighter combined with Martyr. Besides she will prolly have 170 BST! Besides you better slap Wary Fighter on her and give her Martyr as a healing skill + Absorb as a Staff and Live to Serve. Impenetrable wall that constantly autoheals itself when healing a bunch of Allys that run Wary fighter too and are called Surtr!

Martyr is still shit and even more so with Dazzling Staff equipped, and Absorb is also complete shit. Unless Eirika has obscene amounts of Atk, she's not hitting hard enough with Absorb and Wary Fighter to reliably heal through damage she takes, especially considering the fact that Absorb+ is the weakest of all of the final-form staff weapons, she has no access to offensive Special skills, and she has no access to weapon triangle advantage to mitigate damage.

 

8 hours ago, Hilda said:

10 bucks armored Fae will have 185 BST! (because you know people need to pull for higher BST!)

I will gladly take you on that bet. I could always use another $10 for more pulls.

 

8 minutes ago, XRay said:

StarCraft II, and Over Watch seem to be able to implement changes much quicker.

Those are not only flagship titles, but also games where balance is the single most essential aspect to the competitive livelihood of the game, meaning they will necessarily have larger development teams dedicated to them and faster response times.

[XRay]

15 minutes ago, Ice Dragon said:

Those are not only flagship titles, but also games where balance is the single most essential aspect to the competitive livelihood of the game, meaning they will necessarily have larger development teams dedicated to them and faster response times.

And Heroes as a game does not deserve more resources thrown at it? We gave them $400 million in sales in 2 years. Our PvP is not on the same level as other games, but I think our PvP is still vital to the longevity of Heroes. For comparison, StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty sold 6 million, Hearts of the Swarm sold 1 million, and Legacy of the Void sold 1 million. Assuming $60 sales price, that is $480 million in sales over 8 years.

[Ice Dragon]

2 minutes ago, XRay said:

And Heroes as a game does not deserve more resources thrown at it? We gave them $400 million in sales in 2 years. Our PvP is not on the same level as other games, but I think our PvP is still vital to the longevity of Heroes. For comparison, StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty sold 6 million, Hearts of the Swarm sold 1 million, and Legacy of the Void sold 1 million. Assuming $60 sales price, that is $480 million in sales over 8 years.

Heroes isn't a flagship title. Whether or not it's earning more or less money, it's not going to be taking resources away from development for Three Houses which has obviously been running behind schedule. Furthermore, I don't think the balance of Heroes's competitive scene is an absolutely critical issue that needs to be addressed with the same amount of urgency as StarCraft 2's or Overwatch's. Competitive play is literally the entire game for StarCraft 2 (don't bother mentioning the single-player campaigns) and Overwatch whereas it isn't in Heroes.

Then there's also the issue that as far as I can tell, with only some exceptions, Japanese game companies just seem to move at a slower pace than Western companies in terms of response times. I can't say I know the reason why (hierarchic company structure? bureaucratic red tape? old-timey brass that doesn't understand that times have changed?), but it's a general theme I've seen.

[XRay]

13 minutes ago, Ice Dragon said:

Heroes isn't a flagship title. Whether or not it's earning more or less money, it's not going to be taking resources away from development for Three Houses which has obviously been running behind schedule. Furthermore, I don't think the balance of Heroes's competitive scene is an absolutely critical issue that needs to be addressed with the same amount of urgency as StarCraft 2's or Overwatch's. Competitive play is literally the entire game for StarCraft 2 (don't bother mentioning the single-player campaigns) and Overwatch whereas it isn't in Heroes.

They do not have to address PvP issues with the same urgency, but they should at least give players a reply to let us know they heard us and are working on it. A simple Tweet on Twitter to tell us they will figure something out to address player's complaints against Dancers/Singers and ponies in Aether Raids would do wonders, and it would also give players like me who enjoy the mode without the BST crap time to reply and present our arguments. An easy immediate compromise would be to make Tactics Room (O) affect three columns like Schools (O).

PvP also is not the only issue that they are slow at addressing. Some players want more diversity in New Heroes Foci and not as much alt spam. A lot of players do not want to wake up in the middle of the night to catch the Voting Gauntlet multipliers. There are still crap in the 5* pool that players do not want to summon, like Mist and a whole bunch of sword units.

The only time that I remember Heroes doing something quickly was to reduce the enemy stats in Relay Defense.

45 minutes ago, Ice Dragon said:

Then there's also the issue that as far as I can tell, with only some exceptions, Japanese game companies just seem to move at a slower pace than Western companies in terms of response times. I can't say I know the reason why (hierarchic company structure? bureaucratic red tape? old-timey brass that doesn't understand that times have changed?), but it's a general theme I've seen.

Maybe it is a cultural thing and demanding better communication is too much to ask for.

If they would just communicate, western players would be a lot more understanding and patient. Even the slowness can be easily excusable if they present the cost cutting, or whatever that is causing slowness in Heroes, as a way to spend more resources on Three Houses.

[Othin]

22 minutes ago, XRay said:

They do not have to address PvP issues with the same urgency, but they should at least give players a reply to let us know they heard us and are working on it. A simple Tweet on Twitter to tell us they will figure something out to address player's complaints against Dancers/Singers and ponies in Aether Raids would do wonders, and it would also give players like me who enjoy the mode without the BST crap time to reply and present our arguments. An easy immediate compromise would be to make Tactics Room (O) affect three columns like Schools (O).

PvP also is not the only issue that they are slow at addressing. Some players want more diversity in New Heroes Foci and not as much alt spam. A lot of players do not want to wake up in the middle of the night to catch the Voting Gauntlet multipliers. There are still crap in the 5* pool that players do not want to summon, like Mist and a whole bunch of sword units.

The only time that I remember Heroes doing something quickly was to reduce the enemy stats in Relay Defense.

Maybe it is a cultural thing and demanding better communication is too much to ask for.

If they would just communicate, western players would be a lot more understanding and patient. Even the slowness can be easily excusable if they present the cost cutting, or whatever that is causing slowness in Heroes, as a way to spend more resources on Three Houses.

You might think certain statements would make you personally more satisfied, but it doesn't necessarily go for players as a whole. Explaining some things can lead to all sorts of other complaints from people who think they know how it could be done better, as we saw from the deluge of complaints over the FE6/10 banner announcement from people who wanted those banners.