Strategy & Tips – First Minute Games

FEH 11.27 8% Banner Analysis and Pulling Strategy

Every FEH player is tempted by the high 8% rate of drawing the powerful heroes in the banner. The question is only: when to stop.

But is it really much better than the old hero fest banners? Especially for new players who has 7 days to draw from the hero fest starter banner, featuring Ike, Ninian, Yulia, and Genny. Let’s first see who are in the 11.27 banner.

Red: Ike, Ayra, Celica
Green: Hector, Spring Camilla, Deirdre
Blue: The new Ice Queen, Bridal Caeda, Spring Xander,
Colorless: Brave Lyn, Bridal Cordelia, Genny.

I emphasized those that may be used in Arena matching team. The only two heroes not super useful are Spring Xander and Bridal Caeda. The two are still good, but others are great and can be in your final 28 Arena Assault teams.

Now let’s check the 5* rate. Even though the up rate is 8%, the total 5* rate is not changed from previous hero fest (5%+3%). IS dropped the normal 5% to 0. The problem is if the pity rate calculation is adjusted too. In past banners, for every 5 none 5*, you gain 0.25%+0.25% pity rate, total 0.5%. Now if the normal pool is kept at 0%, could it mean the up rate only increase by 0.25%? We don’t know until the banner is here. But even if they increase by 0.5% at a time, it’s still not always good.

Say if you want only one hero from a colour: I want the ice queen in blue only. The rate of getting her is only 8%/3 = 2.7%, less than the normal 3% pool. When you want 2 or more heroes from the same colour, go for it. But in most cases you will draw one before another. Do you stop here when the rate of what you want dropped to 2.7% for that colour?

Different strategies will be applied to different goals. I will split the type of users into these categories:

Collectors who want to get one of each kind over the full life of the game. Or the more kinds the better.
PvPers who would use only high plus heroes.
Other F2P who just want some strong heroes to clean story, fight tempest trial or win grand hero battles.
Fan of a certain char, certain series.

Collector strategy

For new collectors, if you have enough orbs, you should try to get all of them in this banner. You may get duplicates in the end, but because they are all powerful, it will be better than to wait for them to up again and draw from 3%+3% pools. After all, it’s hard to tell when they will be up again next time. Better to get them early when you are still playing the game.

If you don’t have enough orbs, the strategy would be to draw all 5 stones until you obtain the limited hero in that colour. Then you focus on the rest of the colours only. Once you obtain all 4 limited heroes, change to draw from those with more than 2 in one colour. And finally the better hero colour. In general, for this banner green > red > white > blue.

PvPer Strategy

PvP only cares about those who can be in your final team. They should focus on the matching team members first, meaning those worth +10. In this banner, Hector is the must have, for his A skill (distant counter). Ike, Ayra and Ice queue are great too. The rest of the bold heroes won’t have a position in the top team, but they can be in the rest of your 7 teams.

So set you target: plan on what final matching team you want to use. And know what you need. e.g. if you want to run an armored team with all 3* 4* ones, you may only need 5 Hectors in total. Also list other heroes you want and draw all the colours in your list.

Things to note. If you want to +10 only one hero in a colour, you may want to wait for it to be up alone. You saw how I draw my Amelia when she’s one of the 3 ups, and the only green colour. My 5% rate was like 20%, so 8% is not guaranteed to be better. For my Amelia account, I definitely want to draw Hector this time. Not to +10 him (impossible to +10 on two real 5* for F2P), but get the distant counter for my other members. I need 4 so I will want 5 Hectors. Hector has been up 2 times recently and if I miss this I may need to wait for a long long time. Plus the other 2 in green are great also. Green is the best colour for me this time.

Even though red is a great colour this time too, think twice before you want to +10 within this banner. Probability theory said you need 20% more orbs compared with other single +3% banner to +10. You will get side products. But between Ike and Ayra you will want only one in your final team. Celica may not have a position there given that Reinhardt is everywhere in Arena. Deirdre on the other hand can check Reinhardt.

The colourless one is a hard question. On one hand you have the strongest hero in the game that +10 will be useful in all situations. On the other hand we have the colourless hell. And then because of the staff enhancement announcement, the hell may become heaven. Who knows. I have a +atk B-Lyn in main account and I know how good she is. However I will stick with my own rules and not draw colourless before I get enough Hectors. My Amelia account doesn’t plan to have Lyn in the final team anyway.

F2P Strategy

My first advice: don’t draw blue. The only great one in blue is the new ice queen, who will be given for free just like Brave Lyn anyway. Whales will be interested in max her, but what’s the point for F2P.

Then, pick the one you want most and focus on that colour first. If you are more like a collector like I am, maybe you want to draw green still to get spring Camilla. Without her it’s hard to build a flying team. But flying team is only for fun these days, due to the Brave Lyn threat.

As a F2P, be cautious to not let the banner temp you to pay. The banner looks good, but can you live without it? Absolutely. Even the limited heroes come back again. With patient, you will still get them in future, or get a stronger one. Let me go through them one by one with you to tell you what you want to focus one.

The 4 limited heroes: they should be your first priority if there’s one you really want. I think only the spring Camilla is worth it. Even her is optional as you’d hardly need a flying team. You want a flying team to earn the monthly orb, but that’s only one per month, and you can do it without her. Halloween Nowi is a better choice than her if you have to choose between the two. I don’t mind getting S-Camilla as a side product. But it’s OK to miss her. The other 3 are so so. You have Lyn already so you don’t need to spend money on another ranger. If you don’t have Brave Lyn yet? Well. go for colourless hell!

Next, the top tier close fighters. Ike, Ayra, Hector. Ice queen can be obtained for free so she’s out of the question. Ike has been up for many times. Both him and Hector can counter distant. Hector’s CD can be inherited. Ayra is a new strong hero, but you see Mia coming. Same base values, similar skills. There will be more like this in future. Ayra is not unique. They are all great to have, but in my opinion not worth the dollars as they won’t be in your final matching team. As a F2P, I don’t think you will have them +10 or near to be in the final team. If not for the match team, there are many replacements, except for Hector. I guess if you accumulated enough orbs, you will get a Hector. I guess it’s ok if you spend some money to clean up the pity rate in the end if you still expect a Hector. I’m more optimistic that I think I can get enough of him by playing the game for free. If I miss him this time, I can still try next time. Before I have enough Hectors, I will just use my horse emblem.

After the limited heroes and close fighters, there are the mages and healers. Celica, Deirdre, B-Lyn, Genny. For red mage you always have the choice of Tharja. Celica is totally optional. Would you pay your hard earned dollars on someone optional? If the answer is yes, you never were a F2P. Deirdre is good, really good if you don’t have Yulia already. The good news is she’s green, that you may get her already when trying to pull Hector. If you have enough Hectors but still don’t have Deirdre, you know you can wait for her own banner to increase the rate. Genny is in colourless hell. You should have a B-Lyn already as F2P. She was given for free. None of the rangers (except for B-Lyn) have a position in your match team so it’s OK if you only have one of each. And without pluses, most of them can be replaced. But of course B-Lyn and Genny have no replacement. However no one really care about staff users. You don’t need Genny’s skill as much as you want Hector’s.

Fan Strategy

It’s easy to conclude here. Just focus on your favorite. If you plan to +10, better wait until a standalone banner.

Here is my own wish list in order. I have B-Lyn, Ayra, Hector already in my main. B-Lyn, Ike in my sub.

Hector, 5 of him.
Spring Camilla
Deirdre. I only have Cecilia as my green mage. I need more.
Ike. I just like him.
Bridal Cordelia. I like the drawing. For collecting purpose.
Ayra.
B-Lyn
Celica
Bridal Caeda
Ice queen
Spring Xander
Genny

Finally, best luck to everyone who plan to draw from the banner. I will spend all my orbs here, because I don’t think I would get 5 Hectors before I consume them all. I may do a rolling video but I found that draw 1-2 a time suits me more. If you draw all of them in one run, your draws will be averaged among themselves. Meaning you will see a closer to 8% rate. If you spread them out, extreme cases may happen that you maybe super lucky, or super unlucky. The extreme case is more fun for me.

Stranger of Sword City Revisited Tips

Stranger of Sword City Revisited released on NA PlayStation store on Feb 28 2017 as a digital only title. It is an updated version of the old Vita game Stranger of Sword City. It added 3 new classes and updated some dungeons with more lineage types, with a slightly different trophy list.

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I have played the SSOC: Revisited for over 25 hours and still addicted, coming as a fan of the Demon Gaze game of the same developer (Experience). Revisited is actually one of the easier hardcore DRPGs. It’s easier because now you can choose the beginner or easy mode, which is equivalent to removing the permanent death penalty. I still run on the Normal difficulty to experience the original setup, which is also the hardest you can choose from in the new version. The difference is, if my characters die and run out of life points (LP), they will be gone forever. But in the easy mode, your party can be revived once if all wiped out, and those who run out of LP will be giving back 1 so they can recover later at the base. In the beginner difficulty, your party can be revived twice.

Now here are some tips to be successful in this game. I will list only the important ones which people tend to ignore until it’s too late.

Spend some time to re-roll until you get a good team to start

First of all, your selected age determines the minimal points you can get in enroll. If you are 19 years old or younger, you get 3LP but has only 3 minimal points. If you choose 60 years old or 99, you have only 1 LP but you starts with 10 minimal points. You want to pick up 60 or older for your main character because LP doesn’t play a role for her/ him. For your other characters (team members), it depends on your play style as well as how long do you plan to play your party. I recommend 40 – 59 years old to have 2LP, minimal 7 stats points. For 2 LP you can afford to die once. Once you die, don’t revive (so your char won’t die again to be permanently lost) until you come back to base. Always stay hospitalized until you recover all your LP before you depart again, which means you’d better have some backups. I have 9 characters created in the beginning who can go to the battle fields with me, including my main char.

If you choose the fortunate trait for your main character, you get an additional 3 points to the stats points you roll. You can maximally get 33 points this way. But it’s extremely rare in the new game. I settled with 17 stat points. It’s not a big deal if you plan until very high levels, or you rely on your other team members to do the damage.

For your other party members, I strongly recommend the “deprived” trait. You can maximally get 30 points with this trait, but it’s much easier to see high scores compared with all other options. With 2 LP I can get 29 or 30 in half an hour for most of my chars. I have also created some 3LP chars with deprived, one got a 30 too. It’s just rarer. You don’t need to go too high, 27 is already much better than the default 7, and it’s not hard to roll on the deprived trait. Keep in mind that you only gain 1 stat point upon leveling up. By having a high score, you will have a much easier journey at beginning, and save a lot of time trying to grind for higher levels.

Fill your party with freemans

Freeman is a new class in Revisited. They can’t go to the battle field with you, but they will make money while you fight outside. It’s your major income, or at least half of your income. They will also make your shop cost lower, and sells higher, and shorter time to recover Life Points. Their effects stack. I set aside 9 slots to battle crews and 9 to freemans – you have 18 slots in total. So far I only used all 9 battle crews at the same time (including those in hospital) once. I created 2 clerics just in case, one wizard and one puppeteer. But I only take 2 out of the 4 with me at all times. Having 2 with 3LP is probably good enough since being support chars they don’t need very high stats.

Class changing is powerful

Same as the original game, you can change to a different class to have access to its skills (but you have a limit on how many skills to set, initially 3, and max 10). Your cost is some in game money and half of your levels, but at the same time you are given back half of your old HP and MP. It’s totally worth doing the class change. It will make your life easier if you plan it well. Here are the reasons:

Leveling up from 1 to 15 is easy, not much exp.
Some skills are important and useful to other classes.
The HP and MP bonuses are nice. I have 2 chars still staying on their initial or second class, and their HP is pathetic.
When you fight lineage types, you will be asked to apply level cap anyway if you want the rewards. A lower level with more HP is better in this case.
Boss levels is adjusted by your team’s levels. So what’s good about high levels except for higher stats?

The bottom line: I personally experimented chars in original class vs those changed 4 to 5 times. The later type is far more powerful. There’s no reason not to change class. If will make you play faster, less grinding.

Plan your class change journey ahead

You don’t want to change to the same class twice ever. So it’s best to plan ahead. You needed to plan what you want to play with anyway when you roll your chars. You’d want difference races based on the target class. So just write down your target. If you can’t decide yet, just leave some more slots for your battle crews. Then write down what skills you want them to carry. For physical chars you want weapon trick unless it’s a ranger, one of the duel wield skills (Samurai Lv 1, Lv 35 or fighter Lv 35) unless it’s a knight, and clock up or overclock. For magical chars I don’t really need them yet. They are late bloomers so I will comment later.

Here are my experiences:

Ninja is still the best end class for physical chars if you want to level up to at least 32. Otherwise you can choose to stay as a Samurai or Fighter who learns a powerful two-hand weapon duel wield skill (godarm) at level 35 (about 1.5 M exp). Ninja’s last skill is learnt at 28 (about 771 K exp).
Clocker is a must have for almost all end classes. You want either a lv 1 clocker (clock up), or Lv 28 clocker (overclock). Nothing in between is worth putting in your skill set. I previously though the fast cast (lv 10) is more useful than clock up, big mistake. It applies to spells only, so useless to physical chars. Clocker + Wizard may be really interesting. I haven’t finished the build to try it out yet, but I imagine you can overclock to run fast cast, then the master cast, to cast some spell 2 * 2 *3 = 12 times! Well, at least you can cast 6 times by using overclock + master cast. I will update once I experiment this myself.
Clock up is not very useful to Ninjas, because using anything aggressive other than assassination you will reveal yourself. And after clock up once, you can only use Fight or spells. But overclock works with assassination and can be used in any turns.
Even though starts everyone as a clocker at lv 1 and do class change immediately is an excellent idea, you don’t have the money to do it. So have someone starts at clocker lv 1, others targeting dancer lv 6 (weapon trick, another must have skill), then back to Knight lv 3, and finally to clocker lv 1. You can be very creative here regarding what order to use. The Exp required is not much difference.
At about 10 hours into the game, you want to make sure you have one wizard and one cleric, or at least their Lv 1 skills, otherwise you can’t make progress in the game at all.
It’s really fun to plan for your “career”. That’s the reason I like RPGs. But if you are lazy, I will share my party build later in another post (link later).

Most tips online are about the old game so they set something over lv 13 as the best end level for each class, because you gain one skill slot by going over lv 13. In this game lv 13 means nothing. This is what I found to be interesting target levels:

Classes	Useful skills as another class	Target level and their EXP
Knight(28)	Lv 1 (defense training, heavy armor / shield soul) Lv 3 (Guard stance, protect back row) Lv 21 Secret defense (KO & paralyze)	21 (331,000)
Fighter	Lv 3 counter attack Lv 10 Survive with 1 HP Lv 28 Genocide, 7 atk after concentrate Lv 35 Godarm, str based	10 (38400)
Samurai	Lv 1 dual wield, Lv 4 Slash 1 Lv 13 Slash 2, Lv 28 Slash 3, Lv 35 god arm, agi based	4 (2900), 13 (81800), 35 (1,490,900)
Ninja	Lv 1 Evade training Lv 6 Assassination (ignore armor, need hide) Lv 15 Cicada shell (Ignore one attack) Lv 28 Critical hit (Sure hit, power based on length)	15, EXP 123900.
Ranger	Lv 1 bow soul, Hunter’s Eye Lv 6 Confine: lower enemy hit and avoid. Can be used while hidden Lv 28 High concentrate	No need, or 6 for ninja, or 28 for completeness.
Dancer	Lv 3 tri-step, need concentrate Lv 6 weapon trick Lv 8 Whistle Lv 10 sword dance Lv 28 Miracle song	6(9000), 8(20300), 10 (38400), 28 (771,300)
Cleric	Lv 1 Holy weapon Lv 18 Holy shield Lv 25 Mana heal 2 Lv 26 Holy soul (prevent KO) Lv 30 Divine armor, high cure	26 (620,000)
Wizard	Lv 14 high cast (2 times) Lv 27 Master cast (3 times) Lv 30 Tri bolt, Omega impact etc.	14 (101400), 30 (945400)
Clocker	Lv 1 clock up Lv 10 fast cast Lv 28 Overclock, but no fast cast.	1, 28 (771300)
Puppeteer	Lv 12: blindness and break Lv 24: Max.	No use. 12 (64,900) 24 (489,900)

Allocate your blood crystals

This feature is the same as the original game. You must make a choice among three God vessels to learn your divinity skills. Your choice will affect the ending as well but I don’t think that makes a difference in platinum, since you can’t play NG+ in this game anymore, I don’t think the developer wants to force you into play the game a second time. So you should choose purely on which is more useful. Here I must mention the dancer Lv 10 skill, sword song. Make your cleric and wizard learn it and they can sing to increase your divinity. With this you are free to use any high level skills at each turn. So don’t worry about the cost. The length is not that important either but it should still be 2 or higher so that you can alternate it. Some of the divinity skills can make high level class skills obsolete, e.g. the spirit wall can nullify all ailment, so you don’t need the cleric lv 26 skill anymore. Or the 30% MP recovery one may replace mana heal II. You can plan this with your class change journey to save a lot of Exp.

I’m sure you will have more questions. But with what I wrote here in mind, at least you can have a very easy journey and don’t need to restart your game later because you hate your current choices.

Odin Sphere Leifthrasir Platinum Strategy and Tips

Odin Sphere Leifthrasir is an enjoyable game and easy to platinum. Total time to platinum is about 50 hours. It can be shortened by skipping scenes.

There are no missable trophies in the game because you can select any chapter to replay. Inside each chapter you can jump through all the checkpoints you’ve been through. So you can just play the game without any guide and later pick up any missing items. But if you want to fast platinum, here are some tips (there may be minor spoilers):

You need to collect all skills and texts. So if you see an archive icon or skill stone icon on the map, go get them.
You need to taste all food made from the kitchen in the field. Make sure you don’t waste ingredient to save time. You even need a bad grape and an overripe muggle. But don’t worry too much as all ingredients can be purchased from the Koopa Village merchant.
There are secret rooms in the game which hold skill stones and keys. Check this YouTube video to get them all.
Although you will only use up to 4 skills, you can level all of them to get the ATK+1 bonus with low requirement. And it’s always helpful to level up passive skills.