#ellie plays feh

[real-fire-emblem-takes]

You know I find it so funny that everyone sees Tokyo Mirage Sessions as a funny happy idol game when

-The game literally starts with over 500 people being fucking murdered, with three of your party members and one of their sisters being the only survivors

-Tsubasa Oribe, who is reported as being the only survivor because she was the only one who survived that was in the audience, only wanted to be an idol to try and find her sister and figure out what happened to her

-Touma Akagi (put him in FEH) only wants to be an actor because his parents abandoned him as a child and the thing that saved him and stopped him from giving up on life was totally-not-Kamen Rider and now he wants to spread that hope to other children

-Kiria Kurono’s a victim of bullying and deeply represses her love of cute things because she thinks it makes her “gross” because of the way she looks and this ends with her growing and changing and accepting the way that she is

-Eleonora “Ellie” Yumizuru is obsessed with going to Hollywood because she’s always treated as an object or a doll at home and she never felt like she belonged, so she wants to go to Hollywood because she feels like she’ll finally be accepted for who she is there.

-Mamori Minamoto is perfect. She is not traumatized because she’s 11, but her arc is about learning how to stand up for what she wants because the adults around her have been deciding what she wants to do all her life and now she wants them to fuck off and let HER decide what she wants to be and do as an idol.

-Yashiro Tsurugi (put him in FEH too) is also severely traumatized. He watched his father get murdered by Gharnef and never got over it, got saved by Tiki, and now his life’s purpose is to find her again and when he finally does he realizes that she’s completely lost her memory. Also canonically doesn’t know how to eat because his father, while he loved him, kinda sucked and taught him to think only of improving his craft and so he left all the stuff that he considered unimportant to his assistant who he fired after he was against his transfer to Fortuna Entertainment.

Anyway TL;DR TMS is the happy fun idol game but also if you take a couple of seconds to look under the surface you’ll find that every character has reasons for being who they are and they’re so amazing please play Tokyo Mirage Sessions ♯FE Encore for the Nintendo Switch

.

[sweetheart-self-ships]

I am going to scream this is my 6th summer Linde I’ve summoned

P l e a s e ma’am I just want to merge my husband is that too much to ask

[isuzukuretsuki]

Exhibit A as to why I love Loki

[murasaki-murasame]

Oh boy that sure was a whole lotta stuff going on in the 1.5-year anniversary digest video, huh?

I was hoping to post some of my predictions and hopes for it beforehand but life stuff got in the way so here we are, lol.

Anyway there’s a lot I wanna talk about across the board so it’ll go under a cut.

When I saw that this digest was like 20 minutes long I figured it’d be padded out, but lol it’s actually even more dense with material than the last one we got. This really makes up for the recent drought of news and content.

Firstly, they immediately showed off Gala Alex, since she’s a given at this point and we all knew it was gonna happen. Funnily enough she actually seems like she might more or less be bait for the banner happening afterward, which also seems to be a shadow element banner.

In general Gala Alex is a weird and complicated character and I’m not sure what to make of her. At first glance she doesn’t seem super essential or game-breaking, but she has poison infliction and buff dispel, so I’d probably benefit from getting her since I don’t really have good units with that sort of utility in my shadow team yet. But I’m not gonna bother doing more than the free daily tenfold summons on this gala, since as a whole she doesn’t interest me much and I think I could live without her.

On top of her weird skill chain mechanic which I���m struggling to wrap my head around, she also introduces the chain co-ability feature, but I’ll get to that later since it’s a whole big thing.

Hopefully she’ll at least let people start accepting sword units into eKai, lol. That fight has a very open and accepting meta, unless you’re a sword unit in which case you’re fucked because there’s currently no meta shadow sword units people want for that fight.

We’re also getting two separate platinum summons for this gala that cover the past gala units, which is honestly kinda tempting to me since I still don’t have Gala Elly, but I’d just have a 1/3 chance of getting her instead of the other two gala units on her platinum summon, who I already have, so it wouldn’t be worth it.

Then there’s a whole bunch of free summons and wyrmite from new endeavors and co-op rewards getting reset. Which will be helpful in building my stash back up, but I’m probably still gonna avoid spending any resources on this gala.

I’m happy that this gala seems like one I can skip, since I went all in to get Tobias, and I didn’t want to end up regretting that.

Anyway, we also got a look at the next raid event, which will start at the end of this month. It looks like it’s another shadow element one, which just reminds me even more how much we need another wind element raid event, but it looks cool. Aldred has a fun, edgy design. I hope he’s actually worth using. As a shadow unit, he’ll at least be competing with the most stacked element in the game. It also looks like the event’s story is gonna involve the Syndicate, which we’ve actually known about via wyrmprint lore since the game came out, but they’ve never come up until now, so that’s interesting.

They also showed off the banner units, who look cool, but it’d take a lot for me to want to summon for them since I have so many good shadow units as it is. They also said it’ll be another two-part banner, which is getting really annoying.

We’re also getting a rerun of the FEH collab event, along with some sort of a new part two event for it, so that’s cool. I started playing the game at the tail end of the FEH collab originally, but I didn’t actually take part in it since I had performance anxiety about doing any of the co-op stuff, lol. So this means i’ll at least finally be able to get Alfonse.

I think the part two event is probably gonna involve more Fire Emblem characters who’ll be on their own banner, but like with the existing FE units, i don’t really have any attachment to that franchise so I probably wouldn’t be interested in pulling for them.

Though on that note, they did say that all of the four existing FEH units will get mana spirals, which might be interesting. But since I already have Euden and Xainfried at 70MC, as well as Gleo, I don’t think I’d be interested in pulling for Marth, Fjorm, or Veronica, lol. It’s at least interesting to set up this precedent, though. I guess we can assume that if Megaman ever gets rerun, he’ll get a mana spiral too.

If we get new FEH units in a part two banner for the event, I feel like they might end up being a bit underwhelming, since they probably won’t come with mana spirals built into their kits, but we’ll see how it goes.

We also got teasers for the next three main story chapters, which isn’t what I expected at all. We already knew when they’d be coming out since they’re on a fixed schedule now, but I didn’t expect actual teasers of the story content in them. Though tbh the thing that intrigues me the most is the gameplay clips of chapter 14 that involve unique maps based around the Alberian capital. I didn’t think we’d get to actually do stuff there, so that’s cool.

Also, them teasing at Leif showing up in chapter 13 is making me think that either he’ll be the next gala unit, or a welfare unit. Hopefully the latter, since he’s obviously a light sword unit and we already have Gala Euden as a light sword. If he’s a welfare unit, though, I hope he’s not super weak like Laxi.

We’re also getting the event replay feature, but sadly it seems like there won’t be any raid events in it at first, and the facility events included from the start are ones that have gotten reruns relatively recently. So that’s a bit lame. I’m glad they said that they plan on adding raid events to it, though. It looks like you can at least get the facilities from the facility events, so I hope we can also get the welfare units from raid events.

With the new version update they’re also apparently introducing a new currency called fafnir medals which can, to some degree or another, be exchanged for different materials. There’s a whole list of them, but let’s be honest here. The only one that actually matters is the gold testaments, lmao. Unless there’s a really rigid cap on how many of them you can trade for each week/month, that’ll probably be the main thing people trade for. Hopefully it can help address the need for more testaments [especially now that co-abilities are a bit more important]

Then there’s a few bits and pieces to the 1.18 update that they didn’t even mention in the digest. Like how there’ll be adjustments to daily endeavors, the addition of normal endeavors related to using skip tickets on your daily stages, and the ability to check your summon history. But the biggest deal they didn’t mention is how they’re standardizing drop rates in e/mHDTs, and adding horns to the weekly bonus chests for eHDTs. Which is basically exactly what people had been asking for.

We’re also eventually gonna get our encyclopedia feature, which will be nice, especially since it apparently comes with rewards based on how much stuff you have. Which will probably provide a huge batch of rewards to old players right off the bat.

They also showed off two more Agito bosses, who will probably be the next two ones. They didn’t say which would come out next, exactly, but we at least got their names and full designs, which also spells out what elements they are. I can’t actually remember their names at the moment, but the Sylvan lady is water, while the twins are flame. Since wind units have been getting some attention lately, I think the Sylvan lady will be next, and then the flame twins afterward, but we’ll see. One way or another I think the final Agito is gonna be the shadow element one. Which is a bit lame, since my light team really needs a boost. Oh well.

Oh, and they also teased at the Agito, or at least Volk, being formally introduced in chapter 14 of the main campaign, so that’s interesting.

And of course one of the biggest things in this whole update is the huge changes to co-abilities in general. Chain co-abilities are the main thing, but I’m also really intrigued by how in co-op matches, you’ll now take on the effects of your own team’s co-abilities, rather than the co-abilities of the main units your team-mates are using. On the one hand it means you can more comfortably run multiple units of the same weapon type in co-op without feeling like it’s a waste, but I feel like it’s also gonna introduce new ways to cheese some fights, like how 4-Gleo comps can now benefit from stuff like defensive co-abilities from AI units. I think that sort of situation was an intentional choice on Cygames’ part, though. It seems like their way of helping to make end-game content easier and more accessible. It also means that you have to depend less on your team-mates if you need stuff like defensive coabilities to survive an opening blast or something. So you can control that yourself and not worry about what co-op room you end up in.

But the real star of the show, whether or not it ends up being more game-changing than the change to how co-abilities are applied in general, is the chain co-ability feature. Which basically just seems to be a straight up second co-ability that every unit gets, but with the unique quality that they can stack with each other. I don’t actually know how often you’d bother stacking them, though. I looked through all the units I own and what chain co-abilities they have, and it seems like in each element, it’s usually units of the same weapon type that have overlapping chain co-abilities [like Mitsuhide and Fritz getting combo time]. So most of the time I don’t think you’d bother. It also looks like they’re kinda under-tuned, stat-wise, probably to compensate for them being stackable, so I think they might ultimately not be a huge deal, but hey, it’s just a straight up bonus set of stats on top of everything else, lol.

It’s a bit overwhelming since literally EVERY character has a chain co-ability now, and there’s way more variety in them than with regular co-abilities, but there are a few that stick out to me.

-Water seems to be the only element with units that have buff time chain co-abilities, from what I can tell, with Renee, S-Estelle, and Cibella having it. I think this might make S-Estelle a more valued AI team-mate for water teams, since buff time is a pretty big deal, and she also brings the skill damage coability.

-Light seems like one of the main cases where you might stack chain co-abilities, since S-Luca, Annelie, and Fritz have the same one that gives a strength buff whenever you get an energy stack [with a cooldown]. Which I think has a lot of potential, depending on how exactly it works.

-On a similar note, Lucretia has one that gives her a chance to get inspiration stacks when she gets energy stacks [I forget if it applies to just her or the whole team, though], which is interesting. I had a feeling they’d start adding inspiration mechanics to light to complement the amount of energy mechanics going on with them.

-OG Xainfried gets Dragon Claws VI, which seems like it’ll probably be a pretty huge deal for him. Pipple also gets about 18% dragon haste when he’s maxed out, which seems like it’d complement really nicely with Xainfried’s kit.

-Mitsuhide and Fritz’s combo time chain co-ability is gonna be REALLY nice for Gala Luca, since he kinda struggles to keep a high combo, but part of his kit relies on it.

-There’s a whole lot of units who get defensive chain co-abilities which will probably help people get by in HDTs even more. Including units with offensive co-abilities like Mikoto and Valerio.

All in all it seems like a really overwhelming and potentially game-changing mechanic. I also think it’s gonna be just about impossible to properly reflect the implications of it in the DPS sims, lol. This introduces way too many variables. And even then, the DPS sims won’t account for any of the more defensive ones, which have their own value.

Since the chain co-abilities seem to be tied to the regular co-abilities with how they get upgraded, it sounds like this is gonna incentivize getting more people’s co-ability nodes, which will also involve more use of testaments.

The chain co-abilities are one thing, but there’s also some interesting uses for how you benefit from your own AI members’ co-abilities in co-op. Mainly for characters with unique co-abilities like Tobias, H-Mym, and V-Melody. I think Ezelith is gonna basically always want to have an H-Mym on her team, Lin You is gonna want V-Melody on her team, and any wind buffer other than Tobias is gonna want a Tobias on the team to give them more buff-time.

Oh, and I almost forgot that they also casually mentioned that they’re gonna be bringing back defensive battle event types in the future. They didn’t go into much detail about it, but I assume it means that we’ll get more random events once in a while with the same sort of format as the FEH one. Hopefully that’d help alleviate the feeling of stagnation that comes with constantly alternating between raid and facility events endlessly. Since I didn’t actually participate in the FEH event I don’t know what that whole event type entails, though.

I’m probably forgetting lots of stuff they talked about, but they talked about a LOT of stuff, lol. It’s hard to keep track of it all. I wasn’t expecting such a substantial update for the 1.5-year anniversary, but I’m happy with it.

[frostiifae]

fehs problems vs fate go's problems? ive always seen fgo as the superior gacha because its writing is actually decent/sometimes VERY good (camelot!) but i know it has problems so like... which is worse in your humble opinion

well i mean you know already i think fgo is a dramatically better game overall… but idk it’s like, fate grand order isn’t an amazing game probably 85% of the time, 15% of the time it’s Camelot or Babylon or the Kara no Kyoukai collab event (which is fucking awesome, by the way), but the other 85% it’s just a pretty decent gacha game, and that makes it really tragic how short heroes still manages to fall comparatively 

being real fgo has two really serious weaknesses, one is the really inconsistent character design where some of them are awesome but a lot of them are just really gross and awful; the other is the inconsistent writing, which shows in grossness in characters like blackbeard etc and just the general cishet Bad Anime Fan pandering

and then, lesser weaknesses: 

 - the gacha in fgo is really unforgiving with no pity rates and with spirit origins being really hard to get for even big whales - i think you’ve already talked about the good ol’ Sold My Car For Jalter horror story, and others like it - the battle system isn’t super deep and also has some kind of weird idiosyncrasies, like the fact that you can’t see ‘star absorption’ as a stat on servants even though it’s a VERY important stat to understand, or needing to press ‘attack’ to see crit star distribution but not being able to go back to use skills afterward… but some of those things get fixed later in the game’s lifecycle, thankfully 

but compared with heroes… it’s easy to say that heroes has “bad writing” (and it does) but that doesn’t really tell the complete story. like… in my case, marisa was a character i had been looking forward to for a LONG time, even saying i might try to pull for her +10 when she was released (she’s a tempest trial unit, so of course i CAN’T do that, but oh well). once i finally got her, though, i really couldn’t do much with her. just… level her up, give her a skillset that sounded good, and then try to use her in any situation where it felt like she might work. that’s kind of all. it was honestly a let down, and that feeling repeating itself across a few characters contributed a lot to my decision to drop the game.

heroes has a lot of mechanics that compare straight across to grand order; tempest trials are like grand order events, complete with bonus servants vs. bonus heroes - but grand order events have a lot of writing and storytelling, commemorative CEs with charming character art in silly situations/costumes, and give away free welfare servants that are almost universally amazing - ryougi shiki, santa arturia alter, kintoki rider, scathach assassin, even chloe einzbern are all AMAZING top-tier servants that they just GIVE to you for free with max ascension/NP level materials. tempest trials tend to give you lackluster units and you have to spend a lot of materials just to get a +1 merge, meaning they’ll never really reach their full potential compared to a gacha hero. 

hero merit is basically the same as bond xp, except hero merit gives you feathers, but bond xp gives you new dialogue, expanded profile information, saint quartz, and a commemorative Craft Essence for a servant when you max it out. heroes has the accessory system now, which allows you to decorate your heroes with little trinkets you earn from events, while grand order has new arts for every ascension plus there will be event outfits later that you can earn and put onto your servants permanently, and while there are a more limited number of them, they’re designed specifically for that servant. 

there’s a pattern here - heroes just doesn’t really… do anything exciting. it has a lot of the same ideas as grand order, but it doesn’t seem to understand what makes those ideas fun or why players want to play their game at all. there’s no heart to fire emblem heroes. it’s empty and soulless by comparison. 

i worked really hard on my eirika, on my lachesis, on my kagero and my marisa, because they were characters that i really loved. the game only really provided my one way to show that love to them: leveling them and burning very expensive skills through inheritance to make them better. pulling for duplicate copies. it’s unfulfilling. i don’t get anything and the game doesn’t really change to reflect the love i have put into the characters that i care about. 

you can take one look at my support lineup in grand order and understand who my favorite servant is right away. same for ellie. same for you. 

i’m so excited to get jeanne alter’s bond CE. i know exactly who i’m going to Bond 10 after jeanne alter, too! tamamo! i’m gonna grail tamamo to 100, too! because i have that option. i can just pick characters i love and break the game’s rules to make them more powerful. the game gives us mechanics to demonstrate how much we love our favorite servants, and then the ability to show off how devoted we are to them and how much we are willing to invest into them. it fosters a community of celebration and excitement that heroes does not and probably never will have.

yeah, heroes is riddled with problems; pvp is a bad idea for gacha games, the power creep is literally ridiculous, event hero design is bad especially when children are involved, gross pandering dialogue, event heroes almost ALWAYS remark about how uncomfortable they are in their event outfits and people apparently LIKE that, the writing is forgettable at best… but all of those things are secondary to the core failure of fire emblem heroes, which is: it’s heartless. it’s a black hole for you to throw money into in the vain hope of feeling like you’ve done something for your favorite characters. 

maybe they’ll get better at that over time, but honestly, i don’t think it will make much of a difference, and i just don’t think they care enough.

[blvckk-on-blvckk]

Salfa 6wela bs hw 7mar 9dg w elly yghr enh tlgenh al7een nsa esmi lw agulh esmi bygul meen enty ? Y3ni nsani mn kthr albnat elly 3ndh w mn kthr ma yl3b w ana ll7een a7bh w afkr feh m3 enh mrt sna w 5 month bs ana 3'bya y3ni lesh a83d afkr b wa7d ma yswa wla 9'fr rjly walla, y3ni bs yl3b w he broke a heart he never even wanted he just played me, its just like a game he played me and had fun then he leave and go to another game .. y3ni he's love was fake but my pain wasnt, till now im hurt as fuck

aldnya dwara wallah btjeh w7da w btswi feh mthl elli swa feek bs enti ybeelk wgt w 9br w daymn 4kri nfsk blashya2 alshainh elli feh

[isuzukuretsuki]

I physically cannot believe my eyes right now

[isuzukuretsuki]

I never got Delthea but I did get 1 Sully, 1 Odin, 1 Tsubaki, 1 Robin, 1 Jagen, 1 Peri, 1 Est, 2 Donnels, 3 Shannas and 3 fucking Florinas so :  )

[isuzukuretsuki]

So I rolled Sonya’s banner and I got no green orbs twice in a row, then I rolled Delthea’s banner and I got four green orbs and one blue orb and the blue orb was tsubaki. I rolled her banner another time and I got Robin and Est.

Why...won’t Delthea come home

[isuzukuretsuki]

I haven’t gotten a 5 star in *months* and today I officially broken my record. I got a 5 star Merric. My second one.

god dammit can I trade this mofo for Sonya holy fuuuuuuuuuuck I highkey wanna petition for him to be permanently deleted from the game because he’s trash of trash.

[isuzukuretsuki]

Ryoma soloed an entire map by himself with under half hp on the tempest trial this is why lobster boy is the best

[isuzukuretsuki]

I finally got Katarina and shes +def/-spd why do I always get the worst IVs. Always.

[murasaki-murasame]

The next update for DL has a whole bunch of extremely interesting stuff going on in it, and I have a whole bunch of thoughts about it, lol.

This is gonna get long so I’ll put it under a cut.

The skill share system is the huge deal that I have the most thoughts on, so I’ll save that for last and talk about the rest of the version update, and other upcoming content first.

Even aside from the version update stuff, we got an official announcement for the chapter 13 interlude that’ll come out in a few days. It didn’t exactly say much, but it does show that the Agito bosses are apparently going to show up in it. We knew already that they’ll show up in chapter 14, so this is probably just to set up for that, but it’s still exciting. At the moment they’re all kinda boring as characters, so I hope them actually being part of the main story will make them more interesting.

Nothing’s been said about it yet, but I’m also still thinking that the gala will start at the same time, since I think it’ll be right when the current event ends. The current banner’s going to go until the end of the month, but there’s still gonna be a week between the current event ending and the next one starting, so I think we’ll get the gala to fill that gap, and the new event will just have it’s own banner to go with it once the gala ends.

I’m also still in the camp of wanting the new gala unit to be Leif. I’ve already got nearly 450 summons saved up for him, so I have a lot of expectations riding on this, lol. If it ends up being Leonidas or something I might just straight up skip the entire gala out of spite. I already skipped Gala Mars, so skipping Gala Leonidas would be pretty easy at this point, if it comes to that.

Even though part of why I don’t want Gala Leonidas to be a thing is because I think he’d just be another flame sword, but it’s more about how he looks like he’d be another DPS-oriented flame sword, like all the other ones we have. I actually want Gala Leif to be a flame sword, but I specifically want him to be a support-oriented flame sword, so he’d fill a different role than the other flame swords we have. Flame really needs more variety with it’s support units, and I’m still a bit wary that the skill share system will lead to healers like H-Lowen getting shunned, so getting a flame sword who can substitute for him would be nice.

Anyway, we found out from the version update post that around the middle of next month we’ll see the first Onslaught Event, which seems to be the solo-focused event type they teased at earlier. I’m assuming it’s the one they mentioned that’s separate to defensive events like the FEH stuff. I think it’ll probably be a reworked version of the Coliseum from the FEH2 event, which I think would be really fun. Mostly I’m curious to see if it ends up being the type of event that gives us a free character, since that’s always nice.

On that sort of note, I’m still really hoping the upcoming new raid event at the end of the month is a new wind element one. We desperately need another one if only so that we don’t have to deal with Astral Valfarre this often, lol.

As for the version update itself, I’m really interested to see how the new royal regimen endeavors pan out. Mostly because it might give me an influx of wyrmite and summon vouchers in time for the gala. At the very least it looks like a massively expanded version of the jumpstart endeavors, and from what little we’ve seen of it, it’ll at least give a tenfold voucher and a 5-star adventurer voucher. But since the 5-star voucher seems to be the reward for completing 54 endeavors, there might be a whole bunch of other rewards too.

I’m at least hoping all the rewards will apply retroactively so veterans like me don’t miss out on stuff, but they said that people who’ve already started the game can obtain the rewards, so I hope that means everyone can.

Aside from the skill share thing, there’s also other big balance changes that’ll be done in this update, like AI adventurers taking less damage, HDT opening blasts getting nerfed, various changes to different weapon combos, and so on. It’ll all depend on exactly how the numbers pan out, but this could at least make it WAY easier to solo HDTs, and maybe also the Agito bosses.

I’m glad that they’re addressing the fact that HDT opening blasts are an overly punishing and outdated mechanic that can already be shut down with certain characters. Some people won’t like the change, but anything that makes those fights more plausible to solo would be great. In particular I’ve never even touched HZD since I’ve never really had a reason to, but I still want to get the shadow fafnir facility, and HZD himself as a dragon, so it’d be nice to be able to grind it solo.

Since they’re universally going to lower the damage AI characters take, I think it’ll have an impact on basically every fight in the game, so that might changes things up a lot. Especially with the later levels of Mercurial Gauntlet where part of the challenge is being able to do enough damage to kill him without making yourself too fragile to survive.

I think the weapon combo changes aren’t really going to impact anyone’s damage output much, and will be more of an aesthetic sort of change in the long run, but I feel iffy about them removing the jump animation from axe combos, since I’m so used to charging my force strike mid-jump to save time. But removing the jump animation from sword and dagger combos will make those weapon types way more convenient to play.

The real star of the show here is the skill share feature though, lol. I’m still skeptical about how much of an impact it’ll have in the long run since it all depends on how many limits they put in place for it, but it’s still exciting, and I have a lot of speculation about it.

Firstly, one thing I haven’t seen discussed is the implication that not only will different skills have different ‘costs’, different characters might have different caps on how many skill points worth of skills they can equip. They shows that Euden has a cap of 10, but some characters might have a lower or higher cap, and I think that might really dictate a lot of how this actually works out in the end. The way I hope it works is that stronger units have a smaller cap so they have more limitations on what skills they can equip, while weaker units have a higher cap, so they have more freedom to equip two really good skills.

Just as a fairly severe example, if we assume that all buff skills have a cost of 6 like Elly’s S1 does, maybe super overpowered units like Gala Cleo will have a cap of 5, so they’re straight up unable to equip any buff skills, and might even only have room for one skill to begin with. Just as an example of how to balance it so that the already powerful units can’t just equip two really powerful additional skills to get even stronger. And on the other hand, maybe weaker units could have a cap of 12 or so, which means they could equip two 6-point buff skills, which could be a real game-changer, and let those units enter the meta.

That’s basically the main reason why I don’t think it’s a good idea to get too carried away with trying to work out the numbers for if you gave Gala Cleo two buff skills or whatever, since they might intentionally shut down those situations from the start.

They’ve also said that some skills won’t be available to equip at all, which will probably apply to really unique and potentially broken skills like Grace’s S1, which would obviously be way too game-breaking if you paired it with heal skills. Going by the image they posted, I think they might only let you equip a character’s first skill, and not their second, which would eliminate a lot of possibilities. But it’d make sense to just do a blanket ban on equipping S2s, since those tend to be where the really unique mechanics and buffs go. For example, Hawk and Nefaria’s S2s that alter their force-strikes, Gala Luca’s S2 that gives a huge crit damage buff, Chelsea/V-Addis/Natalie’s S2s that lower their health and give them big buffs, etc etc.

If we assume that all S2s, and Grace’s S1, will be banned, I think the other banned skills would probably be skills that inflict defense debuffs, or major status effects like bog. Those are the other types of skills I can think of that could be way too powerful if used in the right way.

It’s interesting to note, though, that aside from the cost system, there doesn’t seem to be major restrictions in what types of skills you can equip. Like, it doesn’t seem to be restricted by element or weapon type, and Euden at least has access to damaging skills, buffs, and heals. There’s also a few examples we can see from the teaser image of skills that inflict ‘regular’ status effects, like Luca and Joe’s S1s. One really notable example is that Ranzal’s S1 is also available, and if we can use the mana spiral version of it, then that means that you can have convenient access to a buff dispel move, since it’s one of the few moves that had dispel in it that’s not tied to the adventurer’s ability.

The teaser image also gives us an idea of what costs different types of skills will have, which has some interesting implications. Most skills seem to hover around 4-5 points, which makes sense if we assume that 10 is gonna be the average limit, but the ones that are lower or higher than that stand out. We have Ranzal, Cleo, Cibella, and Zardin with skills that have a cost of 3, while Elly and Joe’s skills have a cost of 6. I can see why Elly’s skill has a high cost since it’s a universal team strength buff, but it’s interesting that Joe’s skill has a high cost as well, since it’s just an attacking skill that inflicts burn. It makes me wonder if skills that inflict burn/paralysis/poison/frostbite will have a high cost, probably to make it hard or impossible to equip two at once, but I don’t think it’d be a big deal to equip two of them at once, since if anything it’s a bad thing to have too many sources of status afflictions. Luca’s skill also has a slightly lower cost of 5, which makes me wonder why it’s different to Joe’s. I assume it just implies that story characters will have a lower cost for their skills, to make them easier to equip. Which also makes sense if you look at how Ranzal’s S1 has a cost of 3 compared to other damaging skills in the image having a cost of 5, and Cleo’s S1 having a cost of 3 compared to other heals that have a cost of 4 or 5.

Just as a side-note, I took a look at the wiki to remind myself what Laxi’s S1 does, since hers will also be available even if it wasn’t shown in this image, and lmao I forgot that it’s literally one of the worst damaging skills in the entire game. It’s base damage mods are insanely low, and if you can’t use S2 skills at all, then you won’t even be able to make use of the fact that it does double the amount of hits while her S2 is active. Which reminds me that there might be a lot of units who’s skills just aren’t worth using because they’re buffed by their second skills, on top of all of the adventurers who have abilities that add effects to their S1, like how you need to have Gala Cleo’s abilities to be able to use her force strike buff zone after using her S1.

In general I think that the only skills anyone will want to use in the first place will be buffs and heals, with damaging skills only being worth it if they do something unique like dispelling buffs, or inflicting a debuff or status effect. A team strength buff would have way more impact on overall team DPS than a single damaging skill in general, but maybe I’m just forgetting some uniquely powerful S1 someone has that isn’t reliant on one of their abilities or their S2.

I’m kinda worried that the meta will shift even more towards 4DPS comps that have at least one unit with a heal. It wouldn’t really change things much from how they are now, but it might push H-Lowen out of the flame meta, which would suck. At least his HP increase effect is on his S2, so he’ll probably still have that going for him, but still.

Realistically this would probably lead more towards the sort of thing we see in the wind meta with Tobias/Noelle/DY-Xainfried using Freyja and acting as a substitute healer of sorts, but for all elements, and without relying on dragon skills. So it’s be more along the lines of the ‘healer role’ being diversified, but it still probably means that most staff units will be shunned because the only thing they do is heal, so they’d probably be invalidated by a buffer who brings at least one heal skill.

I’m hoping that, on the flip-side, this will also lead to healers being able to bring buff skills, and thus leading them to effectively doing the same thing as buffers who bring heal skills. For example, if H-Lowen used Emma’s S1, and Emma used H-Lowen’s S1, then the only difference between them would be their S2s, and even those are fairly similar, since Emma has a team defense buff, and H-Lowen has a heal mixed with an HP buff. So they’d do slightly different things, but be similar enough that, hopefully, healers like H-Lowen could do both buffing and healing without just being shunned by the meta.

Most buffers have buff time passives going for them, which probably makes them better, but hopefully not to the degree that they just invalidate healers entirely.

Depending on how this plays out, it could lead to some really interesting possibilities with having characters focus on different things depending on what skills they have equipped. Like if you wanted to make Heinwald into more of a healer, or more of a DPS unit. 

One thing to keep in mind is that staff units also have really high SP gain per attack, which might mean that they could get buff skills off substantially faster than a regular buff unit, which could at least make up for not having a buff time passive. But we’ll see if they do anything to adjust SP costs for skills to take that into account.

Even if heal skills get left to dedicated support units like Tobias, DPS units will probably still end up equipping buff skills since they should be more powerful than a damaging skill, so I can’t help but wonder just how drastically it’s going to impact the game if you have four units with access to team strength buffs, lol. I feel like that might just skyrocket the potential team DPS you can achieve, which might really trivialize certain fights in co-op. Which may or may not be a good thing.

And THEN there’s the whole topic of how on top of you needing to 50MC a unit and get them to level 80, you need to use a new type of item to actually make a skill available to be equipped, and it looks like that type of item will just be given out through events and through the shop [which probably refers to real money packs]. So basically I think everyone should just brace themselves for only being able to afford to unlock one or two skills per element. I don’t really think that’s a huge deal though, since you only have the two skill share slots to work with in the first place. Elly’s S1 is also non-elemental and immediately available to use, so everyone will have access to one good buff skill, and Cleo’s heal is also going to be immediately available if you need a heal skill. Ranzal’s S1 is also gonna be free, if you need the buff dispel from it. So there’s already some pretty good options to work with without needing to spend any resources.

In general the main skills people will want to unlock would be their element’s strength buffer if they don’t go for Elly’s S1, a defense buff, and a heal. And since defense buffs and heals aren’t element-locked, you can just use someone like Pipple or Patia in any element for their defense buffs, and someone like OG Cleo for heals. In terms of raw healing power I think the top units would probably be N-Aeleen and S-Verica, and H-Lowen provides both a heal and a defense buff. There’s also Grace but I’m almost certain her S1 will be automatically banned.

There’s various units who have team strength buffs on their S1s via skill shift mechanics, but I don’t think those would be worth using just for the strength buffs. You’d be better off just using a regular buff.

Strength and defense debuffs have a lot of potential to be worth using, especially in raid content, but for that exact reason I think some/all of those types of skills might also be banned.

There’s also the question of if it’ll be worth replacing an Agito weapon skill with a shared skill, which might also be a bit of a problem, but unless you need the alternating defensive buffs from them, I think a team strength buff would be better than even the shadow Agito weapon’s self-only attack rate buff.

Anyway this was far too many words to write about an entire game mechanic that we have vague and incomplete information about, lmao.

[murasaki-murasame]

I was planning to make a whole post anyway about my hopes and predictions for Gala Leif if he ends up happening next month, but there’s also a whole lotta other stuff to talk about now with the FEH rerun, the Ciella fight teaser, and our first gala dragon, so I guess I’ll take the chance to just talk about everything all at once, lol.

I feel like I went through every possible human emotion in the span of like ten seconds when I saw the gala banner announcement a day or two ago and then saw what it was actually about. That sure was a roller-coaster.

I honestly don’t really care about Mars that much [mainly because I’m always just more interested in adventurers than dragons], but I’m really curious about the precedent this is setting, with this being our first gala dragon, and this also happening only one month after the last gala banner.

They’ll probably talk about it in the next This Month post in a week or so, but I’m gonna just assume for now that we’re gonna get gala banners on a monthly basis from now on, rather than every two months. Which is a little bit scary to think about since it gives us less time between each gala to save up for each one, but we’ll just see how it goes.

Everyone’s predicting that we’re gonna alternate between gala dragons and gala adventurers, but I’m not sure it’ll be strictly scheduled out like that. I feel like we’re just switching to a monthly schedule and we just happened to get a gala dragon as the start of the schedule shift. I think it’s more likely that we’re going to start seeing reruns of old gala units between entirely new gala characters. I mean, it’s pretty obvious how much revenue it’d get them if they ever decided to rerun Gala Cleo or Gala Alex, lol.

Mostly I just can’t even think of that many options for what they could release in terms of gala dragon alts. We might get some of the other dragons that the royal siblings have pacts with, but we only know of like two other ones.

Mars’ introduction is bringing up the whole hot button issue of powercreep in the fandom, but honestly I don’t think Mars being really powerful is that big of a deal. He’s not exactly essential for any content, and tbh at the end of the day I just think it’d be weird if our first gala dragon WASN’T notably powerful. People already complain about dragon banners as it is because they have such low value. I can only imagine how many complaints there’d be if we got our first gala dragon and it only ended up being a sidegrade to the existing options. From what I’ve seen of how Mars changes up things on the DPS sim, I think they struck a good balance of making him powerful without him being super gamebreaking. I honestly think that Marth’s mana spiral is a much more blatant example of powercreep, and has had more of an impact on the flame meta than Mars alone.

Anyway, on the note of Marth and co, the FEH rerun has finally begun, and I kinda have to agree with everyone that the defense gamemode just doesn’t really feel good to play at all when it’s locked to solo, lol. It’s so obviously designed for co-op instead. It’s not really that big of a deal, but it does feel like more of a slog than it should, especially since you have to do it like 45 times for the event endeavors, and since there’s so many valor rewards. I’m curious to see how it pans out when this becomes a regular gamemode for future events, though. Hopefully they get better at balancing it and making it fun to play.

Even though I still don’t have any interest in pulling on any of the FEH banners since I just want to save for Gala Leif, I did decide to 70MC Alfonse, because haha bad decision machine go brr :) But I honestly do like him a lot, and I’m excited to get Sharena from the upcoming event. I hope she’s a light lance since I don’t have H-Elly or H-Vanessa, but we’ll see how it goes.

We also got some more teasers of the new FEH event and how it’ll play out. It looks like it’ll be a wave-based arena mode of sorts where you fight lots of enemies, which apparently include boss versions of different gacha characters. I think they mentioned a while ago that they’ll be introducing a new event type to the event rotation along with defense battles, and I assume this’ll be the first example of it. If they do, I hope they keep the part with you fighting boss versions of gacha characters, since that’s a neat idea that makes them feel different from the other events we get and the bosses we fight.

They haven’t really said anything about what the new FEH units will be like aside from Sharena, and I can’t really make any guesses since I’m not a Fire Emblem fan to begin with, but I’m already bracing myself for the inevitability of us getting a two-part banner for the new units, lol.

We’re also getting Ciella’s fight at around the start of next week, and they posted a preview video of the standard difficulty version of it. It seems like she inflicts a unique debuff called Vulnerability, so I’m really curious to see if I end up being correct with my previous theory about certain wind units getting debuff cleanse mechanics added via mana spiral upgrades. I think there’s at least one part in the video where Lowen heals the team and it doesn’t cleanse Vulnerability like it does with Plague, and it’d be a bit weird if you’re just meant to deal with having the debuff until it eventually wears off, so it’d be neat if they do introduce a new debuff cleanse mechanic.

Though tbh I can’t actually tell exactly what Vulnerability is meant to even do, since I don’t think it seemed to have a big impact on how much damage characters took, even though it definitely sounds like it’s meant to be a defense debuff or something. Either way, it’s probably going to be the central mechanic of Ciella’s fight, so hopefully we get tools to deal with it.

They only showed off the standard version of her fight so things will probably get more complex in expert, but it looks like her fight’s going to be built around making you move around a lot to dodge attacks. She seems to have various purple attacks, as well as homing attacks, and one move that seems to fire projectiles that bounce around the map. I don’t know how much this will really impact things, but it at least seems different to how relatively little you have to move around in Kai Yan.

It also looks like she might have unavoidable freeze-inflicting attacks, which might be interesting. They probably want you to use at least one freeze-res character. Which might not really diversify the meta much from where it is now, since Hawk has freeze res, but we’ll see how it goes.

We haven’t heard anything about us getting more wind mana spirals, but I’d be kinda surprised if we don’t get any more for this. In general wind is in a bit of an awkward spot, and if we don’t get more mana spirals for it soon, I feel like the Ciella meta is just going to be Tobias + Hawk [and maybe Lin You] again, if only just due to a lack of good options.

I’m also still really interested to see what the wind Agito weapon buffs end up being, and how much they might benefit certain characters. I think that a crit rate buff might be pretty nice, at least for characters like Ku Hai, but that sort of a buff probably wouldn’t help people like Lin You or DY-Xainfried much since they have crit rate buffs in their kits already. A crit damage buff could be interesting, but unless you’re playing as Lin You or have a DY-Xainfried on the team, it might not be as good as a crit rate buff.

Either way, I’m slowly getting a 0UB wind CT2 of each type just so I have all my options available to me, but I feel like the first wind Agito weapon I get will probably be a blade or wand, since I’ll probably end up using either Tobias, Noelle, or DY-Xainfried against Ciella most of the time. I do have a 70MC Lin You, though, so I might get an axe too.

We’ll see how it goes when the fight comes out, but I’m gonna assume that Ciella will probably be about as difficult as Kai Yan. Though since she doesn’t seem to have the same ‘you deal twice as much damage to the boss as you normally would for some reason’ mechanic as Kai Yan, and since wind is way less broken as an element than shadow as a whole, it’ll probably take a bit longer to clear. Though tbh I’m still like 100% expecting people to be able to clear it notably faster with full shadow teams than wind teams, so there’s that to consider, lol.

Anyway the main thing I’ve been thinking about recently is Gala Leif, who I’m still hoping against hope will come out at the end of next month.

It’s not like we know for sure he’s gonna ever be released at all, but with chapter 13 he’s officially joined Euden full-time, and he got a whole new redesign and 3D model to commemorate it, which really seems like blatant set-up for him getting a gala alt. Like how Sarisse has her NPC design, and a 3D model based on it for Melsa’s event, but then she got a new outfit and 3D model for her gala alt. Even Mym technically got her design tweaked a bit for her gala alt compared to her regular NPC artwork.

I wasn’t even sure at first if Leif got a new outfit for chapter 13 or if it was just a different pose, but it’s definitely a different outfit. Or, more accurately, it’s basically his old outfit but tweaked and redesigned to be more ornate and fancy and detailed, which is pretty telling. And I’m pretty sure his 3D model from the Void Poseidon fight was a new one based on his new outfit, which is also just even more additional design work to put into someone who’s currently just an NPC.

I heard that in chapter 9 he was basically given the same sort of internal coding as Albert [like how NPC Zethia in chapter 1 was apparently based on Hildegarde’s data], but I don’t really think he’s going to be a light unit, at least if he does end up as a gala unit. We already have Gala Euden as a gala light sword adventurer, and I don’t think they want to double up on that. I also feel like one way or another Leif is going to be fairly support-based, which would make him overlap with Gala Euden even more if he were a light sword. So I’m just hoping that doesn’t happen.

In the long run I think that his role in combat will be more relevant to the question of which units he’d overlap with, rather than his element/weapon combo. I mean, we could have a purely offensive gala light sword and they wouldn’t actually conflict too much with Gala Euden because they’d do different things. The various changes we’ve gotten to how co-abilities work, and the introduction of unique co-abilities, means it’s not really a big deal to have two units with the same weapon type in a team together so long as they do different things.

Which is also why I don’t want him to be a wind or water element sword unit, either. Gala Ranzal is [kind of] defense-oriented already, and also he just doesn’t deserve to get directly overshadowed by a hypothetical new gala wind sword, lol. And even though Gala Elly is a different weapon type, Leif would definitely conflict with her in practice if he was a support-oriented water unit.

Funnily enough I think him being a shadow element gala sword built around team buffs could work fine, and he wouldn’t really overlap with anyone aside from maybe Patia, but realistically I doubt we’ll get another gala shadow sword so soon after Gala Alex, no matter how different they might be in practice, lol.

So basically due to process of elimination I think I’d want him to be a gala flame sword. On the one hand the idea of a gala flame sword doesn’t really interest me at all, but honestly I think he could be surprisingly interesting and really shake things up if he’s support-oriented. Nearly all of the flame swords we have are pretty much entirely offensive, and nobody uses Karl even though he can technically be used as a support-based flame sword with the right set-up. So I honestly think that Leif could have his own relatively unique niche in the flame meta even if he ends up with such a common element/weapon combo.

There’s also the fact that Volk seems like it’s going to end up being the hardest Agito fight by a substantial degree, so I think it’d make sense to start introducing more flame units designed to let people break into that fight. And from what I know of the Volk meta [from having never actually played eVolk myself, lol], it seems pretty obvious that the big hole in the flame meta at the moment is how H-Lowen is basically the only accepted support unit, and he’s an entirely support-focused unit who does next to nothing to contribute to the team’s DPS. If eVolk and HMS didn’t have unavoidable damage and high difficulty in general, he’d probably lose his place in the meta, which I feel like is kinda already happening as a result of Hawk and Marth’s mana spirals. So I feel like what flame really needs right now, rather than more good DPS units or more good healers, is a support unit who can also contribute to team DPS.

So basically what I want is for Gala Leif to be like a mix of Tobias, Gala Elly, and T-Hope. If he wants to be an alternative/replacement to H-Lowen, he’s going to need at least SOME healing, on top of offensive/defensive buffs. I wouldn’t actually want him to have enough healing to straight up replace H-Lowen as a healer, but if he wants to be an alternative to him then he at least needs enough to deal with stuff like cleansing plague.

In general my basic idea of how I think his kit could work in order to fulfill that role is that he could have an S1 that has a big strength boost and a smaller defense boost [so like a reverse of Patia’s S1], and an ability/chain co-ability that gives Team Healing Doublebuff. Preferably on the level of 5% HP per tick instead of 1% HP per tick like with T-Hope. I think that’d basically be all that he needs to be able to work as a team support unit who can contribute to team DPS while also providing enough healing to deal with plague and recover people from unavoidable damage, even though he wouldn’t be as good of a generalist healer as H-Lowen.

For both Volk and HMS there’s also the issue of interfering with melee baiters, and needing to do ranged baiting for certain moves, so in spite of him being a sword unit, maybe they could give Gala Leif an S2 that gives him a ranged attack stance like Tobias, so he can let the melee units do their thing.

This is all just more or less baseless speculation, but this is just what I’m thinking they could do to address the fact that Volk is the hardest Agito fight, that the support role is the most exclusive and difficult role in that fight, that H-Lowen is basically dead weight DPS-wise who seems to slowly be losing his relevance in the face of 4DPS team comps, and that Emma has basically never been meta for Volk and has become way less important for HMS with how co-abilities work now. So introducing a new gala unit who provides fairly substantial team DPS buffs along with adequate healing seems like it’s exactly what the flame element needs right now. And considering that Gala Alex has poison and buff dispel it’s not exactly impossible that we could get a gala unit designed to work against Volk. It might make more sense for us to get a wind gala unit next to go against Ciella, but I still think that Ciella won’t be as hard as Volk, and wind also already has more in the way of viable support units than flame does at the moment.

The fact that our first gala dragon is also a flame one designed for DPS units, along with Marth getting a super powerful mana spiral, also just makes me think that they’re still trying to address the Volk meta and give people more options for it, so I think it’s reasonable to assume our next gala unit might be designed to address the support/defense part of the flame meta.

It’s worth noting, though, that I’m pretty sure Leif had some sort of team defense buff when he showed up in chapter 9, which is basically the main reason why I’m assuming he’d be a support/defense-based unit rather than an offensive one. Patia also ended up being a team support unit so it’d just make sense if he ended up being kinda similar, lol.

Anyway this was way too many words to just say that I want my boi to finally come home :v