For Freeze and other "offensive" staves Céline and Hortensia have great Luck to use DP+ effectively which is reliable and you get it earlier than the return of Micaiah.
Divine Pulse with Freeze + Silence is bonkers completely shuts off many bosses, easy S. Didn't find much use for mid-late game with Obstruct it puts in a lot of work early on though.
The healing calculation is base+magic/2. Fire Emblem always rounds down for all calculations across all games to the best of my knowledge. Base values are: Heal 10, Mend 20, Recover 40, Treat 15, Physic 8, Fortify 7. Looking at gold per HP healed, cheap staffs are always more efficient, but the gap is smallest for low magic units. At 0 magic, heal costs 2 gold per HP, mend costs 2.5. Mend is 25% more expensive in this case. At 20 magic, heal costs 1, mend costs 1.67. Mend is 67% more expensive in this case. The other factor to look at is turn cost. A 20 magic unit with heal can restore a unit with 40 lost HP to full in 2 turns for 40 gold. A 0 magic unit with recover can restore that same unit to full in 1 turn for 300 gold. Late game, or on an iron man run, when I've got more deployment slots than good combat units, I tend to class change trashy units to martial monks and give them stuff like recover, rescue, restore, obstruct. They can do staff work nearly as effectively as high magic units, and chain guard. The biggest catch being they're inaccurate with status staffs, and recover isn't gold efficient. Another fun piece of tech I like using obstruct for is to just activate canter. 50 gold for +2/3 movement. Having an obstruct staff I think is the only way in the game to guarantee you can get canter from any position. It's like a mini rewarp. Nodus I've never used, but I think it's very clearly designed for the final boss battle after he forces everybody out of engage. I think D tier is right. Illume, for the longest time, it never occurred to me to use it with Micaiah. Instant 12 range vision on maps 6 and 20. Aside from that, it also activates canter, so being able to see a threat, then back off if needed is pretty decent.
one thing to mention about obstruct too, besides the easy xp and low cost, is that when having canter on mages, which you typically would, it gives them more movement on a turn that you aren’t attacking with them and just need to reposition. for example a sage anna can move 5 tiles, obstruct anywhere, and move 3 more tiles freely. obviously any other distance staff can do this, but obstruct is by far the cheapest and doesn’t require an enemy or ally unit to target.
that’s a great point. i wanna try my Sage Expertise / Starsphere Jean & Soren with Canter when i get it back with 2x Boots and Rewarp to just JUMP. Really far. it’s on Hard, shouldn’t be a risk whatsoever!
The engage meter refresh staff. I can see it getting a lot of use in trials where item consumption isn't permanent. As an example, enabling your Edelgard user to raging storm across the relay trial to the other side and clearing the map in one go to guarantee rewards that you want.
ICG I did a maddening dlc run recently and ran tier 4 wells early by chapter 8 on it was all tier 5s with Anna spam on the Hyacaith clone and Veronica was contacting her to get 2 kills per turn. So I just loaded it back up and it’s on chapter 20 I have 3 Nodus staves the S rank. I have Elusia at Level 2. The 5 star well is really good if you can sustain with Anna. I also ran less units and forges relied more on xp from staves & emblem weps. But you can definitely self sustain tier 5 wells. It shoots out silver greatlances and other good stuff all the time.
Another thing in regards to Reflect is that it is one of the best EXP grinding tools in the game once obtained, where you can have a Soren user spam Reflect while surrounded by as many allies as possible. This is an incredible tool to catch up underleveled units, especially on maps with 1 tile chokepoints that can be clogged with a defense stacked General or Avoid-stacked Thief, which gives you basically infinite exp because reflect requires no resources to use, unlike heal staff spamming. Investing early into Favourite Food before Celica is stolen on a unit like Clanne or Etie, then giving them Soren bond 11 for effectively 8 turns of Reflect spamming minimum a map allows for them to catch up in EXP, and even can give absurd SP if you want to let them get capped at Lvl 20 unpromoted while SP gain remains high. If you also get Starsphere early, you can basically build up a super unit in 1 map provided good positioning to allow the Soren user to attack to refill emblem gauge.
There is an exploit where if you level up and have your weapon unequipped, and when time crystal back, your unequipped weapon gets replaced with an extra copy of the staff, being in a situation where all of these conditions are meet, while also having time crystal uses is really tedious to set up.
I think obstruct should be ahead of some of the other staves in S tier since it's way easier to use in terms of econ and can do more of its thing without a Micaiah engage. Same with Fortify although Fortify doesn't have the easy econ that Obstruct does. Basically any staff user on the team should just have an Obstruct and a Heal on them if they have the room for it in their inventory since those are easy to get and use. The only chapters for restore that I can think of are 11 and 16 and those can be done with one restore per play through. I definitely don't like using the attacking staves though given their hitrates. The only ones I see use for are Freeze with Micaiah and Staff Mastery or Entrap with Staff Mastery against late game bosses. (I believe Chapter 24 is known as a good entrap chapter and maybe the first part of 26.)
Entrap can be used with micaiah even without staff mastery by using an armor adjacent to the boss to entrap the boss with it Although freeze I find less useful personally it still has a lot of use
@@noathern I’m seeing in other comments that putting Divine Pulse on a high luck unit can work too for staff accuracy (and all accuracy). I may try that on Hortensia since her luck is so good, and she can use luck+ already for the world tree
I actually love Entrap. I HATE how theres only 3 uses, and theyre so hard to get. If Entrap had like 10 uses, Id spam them all the time. If anything, watching your vids, I think you underuse entrap. But it makes sense, since you get so little of them, and your focus on enemy phase makes entrap pointless lol. But entrap allows you to pick and choose what annoying enemy you want to kill. It also lets certain units get to positions you wouldnt normally get by yanking threats away from them. But yeah, entrap's usage is a huge problem for the staff. I just love it so much.
@alemfi An easier way to lock it up is to go just in range of the Wyrms and they block the doors. Go back out of range after they attack and the doors remain blocked for the rest of the map.
Something i discovered about Obstruct that i haven't seen people post is you can use it to completely divert enemies. If you set up two obstructs with 1 open tile between them, i think the AI sees if it destroys the first ice block the path is still blocked, so if there is another path to your units they will actually walk away from the Obstructed choke. Very helpful if you're getting overwhelmed by enemies.
Note this doesn't work if the two tiles are directly adjacent, i guess because the AI counts them as one path. So if you just put down a micaiah obstruct they will break through it, but maybe if you have a 1- tile wide choke, put down 3 tiles with micaiah and break the middle one it would work
For next FE game they should make it so Staves are limited use *_per map,_* so they don't break, just refresh after the battle. Makes staves like Nodus actually make sense and would be good-feel.
I didn't mind it too much since they were able to limit how many uses you should be able to have per map. I do wish though that some of the spells could have been reworked like Nosferatu for example.
I know you've said before you wouldn't do an ironman because of the low percentage crits and misses and other bs but it's a really fun challenge and it's just a new way to approach the game and make a new playthrough feel interesting.
Fortify+ is basically the S rank staves from either Blazing Blade or Sacred Stones, but tied to a different durability metric, that being the Engage meter.
Divine pulse is a cheap way to make staves more accurate, especially for high luck units like Celiné. The major downside is that hit rates now like to you. The upside is that even your regular attacks become more accurate.
silence is not good although still viable in some situations because of how staff hit work. You want to silent those who use magic and they all have high res so it is very counterintuitive.
Offensive staffs are interesting cause I looked it up when I noticed my avoid tank lapis was still getting hit by enemy staff users pretty reliably. And according to some wikis staff hit rate is the hit rate listed on the staff + mag + dex. There is also a separate avoid calculation for staff which is res x 3 + 0.5 × lck. Staff avoid also doesn't get benefit from skills like marth's +avoid but does get terrain bonus to avoid (double for covert) assuming the staff user isn't a mystical.
Which imo makes silence even worse cause most enemy mages will have good res meaning unless you have staff mastery or divine pulse you are almost never going to hit them with silence.
Random unrelated(ish) question: I'm wanting to do an 8 man run. How many should I deligate to phyical/magic damage carries and how many should be utility? Would like 5 carries to 3 utility be good, or 6 carries to 2 utility?
You can't go wrong with 2-3 damage carry bruisers (Units that can at least survive a single enemy attack during enemy phase) 2-3 tank DPS with speed fixing and rest utility/healer/chainguard/bondedshield
I've spent 5 minutes testing some opening moves but haven't attempted it yet. Prioritizing guides/my new early game xenologue maddening unit playthrough which will be upcoming. This DLC drop also delayed my 7 man no DLC run which is the thing I would rather do. I still have some other runs that are on CH23 I need to finish that I haven't gotten around to that weren't for YT content so I remember why I stopped them lmao
Framme keeps eating all the staffes 😭
For Freeze and other "offensive" staves Céline and Hortensia have great Luck to use DP+ effectively which is reliable and you get it earlier than the return of Micaiah.
I second divine pulse. Makes those staffs practically 100% hit. Also. Michaah and illume hortensia will light up an entire map.
sounds like jean high priest would do well.
I was going to comment as well. Divine Pulse is so nice.
Never thought of that, thanks for the idea!
You missed the main use of Entrap. You pop Aether and let an enemy mage pull you into a crowd and watch them all drop.
Miss!
Divine Pulse with Freeze + Silence is bonkers completely shuts off many bosses, easy S. Didn't find much use for mid-late game with Obstruct it puts in a lot of work early on though.
“Or I could use the warp staff.” Bismix, all the time
The healing calculation is base+magic/2. Fire Emblem always rounds down for all calculations across all games to the best of my knowledge.
Base values are: Heal 10, Mend 20, Recover 40, Treat 15, Physic 8, Fortify 7.
Looking at gold per HP healed, cheap staffs are always more efficient, but the gap is smallest for low magic units. At 0 magic, heal costs 2 gold per HP, mend costs 2.5. Mend is 25% more expensive in this case. At 20 magic, heal costs 1, mend costs 1.67. Mend is 67% more expensive in this case.
The other factor to look at is turn cost. A 20 magic unit with heal can restore a unit with 40 lost HP to full in 2 turns for 40 gold. A 0 magic unit with recover can restore that same unit to full in 1 turn for 300 gold.
Late game, or on an iron man run, when I've got more deployment slots than good combat units, I tend to class change trashy units to martial monks and give them stuff like recover, rescue, restore, obstruct. They can do staff work nearly as effectively as high magic units, and chain guard. The biggest catch being they're inaccurate with status staffs, and recover isn't gold efficient.
Another fun piece of tech I like using obstruct for is to just activate canter. 50 gold for +2/3 movement. Having an obstruct staff I think is the only way in the game to guarantee you can get canter from any position. It's like a mini rewarp.
Nodus I've never used, but I think it's very clearly designed for the final boss battle after he forces everybody out of engage. I think D tier is right.
Illume, for the longest time, it never occurred to me to use it with Micaiah. Instant 12 range vision on maps 6 and 20. Aside from that, it also activates canter, so being able to see a threat, then back off if needed is pretty decent.
one thing to mention about obstruct too, besides the easy xp and low cost, is that when having canter on mages, which you typically would, it gives them more movement on a turn that you aren’t attacking with them and just need to reposition. for example a sage anna can move 5 tiles, obstruct
anywhere, and move 3 more tiles freely. obviously any other distance staff can do this, but obstruct is by far the cheapest and doesn’t require an enemy or ally unit to target.
that’s a great point. i wanna try my Sage Expertise / Starsphere Jean & Soren with Canter when i get it back with 2x Boots and Rewarp to just JUMP. Really far.
it’s on Hard, shouldn’t be a risk whatsoever!
The engage meter refresh staff. I can see it getting a lot of use in trials where item consumption isn't permanent.
As an example, enabling your Edelgard user to raging storm across the relay trial to the other side and clearing the map in one go to guarantee rewards that you want.
ICG I did a maddening dlc run recently and ran tier 4 wells early by chapter 8 on it was all tier 5s with Anna spam on the Hyacaith clone and Veronica was contacting her to get 2 kills per turn. So I just loaded it back up and it’s on chapter 20 I have 3 Nodus staves the S rank. I have Elusia at Level 2. The 5 star well is really good if you can sustain with Anna. I also ran less units and forges relied more on xp from staves & emblem weps. But you can definitely self sustain tier 5 wells. It shoots out silver greatlances and other good stuff all the time.
Another thing in regards to Reflect is that it is one of the best EXP grinding tools in the game once obtained, where you can have a Soren user spam Reflect while surrounded by as many allies as possible. This is an incredible tool to catch up underleveled units, especially on maps with 1 tile chokepoints that can be clogged with a defense stacked General or Avoid-stacked Thief, which gives you basically infinite exp because reflect requires no resources to use, unlike heal staff spamming. Investing early into Favourite Food before Celica is stolen on a unit like Clanne or Etie, then giving them Soren bond 11 for effectively 8 turns of Reflect spamming minimum a map allows for them to catch up in EXP, and even can give absurd SP if you want to let them get capped at Lvl 20 unpromoted while SP gain remains high. If you also get Starsphere early, you can basically build up a super unit in 1 map provided good positioning to allow the Soren user to attack to refill emblem gauge.
There is an exploit where if you level up and have your weapon unequipped, and when time crystal back, your unequipped weapon gets replaced with an extra copy of the staff, being in a situation where all of these conditions are meet, while also having time crystal uses is really tedious to set up.
Shout out Micaiah. You know why.
*In Sothe’s voice*
“Good job Micaiah”
I think obstruct should be ahead of some of the other staves in S tier since it's way easier to use in terms of econ and can do more of its thing without a Micaiah engage. Same with Fortify although Fortify doesn't have the easy econ that Obstruct does. Basically any staff user on the team should just have an Obstruct and a Heal on them if they have the room for it in their inventory since those are easy to get and use.
The only chapters for restore that I can think of are 11 and 16 and those can be done with one restore per play through. I definitely don't like using the attacking staves though given their hitrates. The only ones I see use for are Freeze with Micaiah and Staff Mastery or Entrap with Staff Mastery against late game bosses. (I believe Chapter 24 is known as a good entrap chapter and maybe the first part of 26.)
Entrap can be used with micaiah even without staff mastery by using an armor adjacent to the boss to entrap the boss with it
Although freeze I find less useful personally it still has a lot of use
@@noathern I’m seeing in other comments that putting Divine Pulse on a high luck unit can work too for staff accuracy (and all accuracy). I may try that on Hortensia since her luck is so good, and she can use luck+ already for the world tree
I actually love Entrap. I HATE how theres only 3 uses, and theyre so hard to get. If Entrap had like 10 uses, Id spam them all the time. If anything, watching your vids, I think you underuse entrap. But it makes sense, since you get so little of them, and your focus on enemy phase makes entrap pointless lol. But entrap allows you to pick and choose what annoying enemy you want to kill. It also lets certain units get to positions you wouldnt normally get by yanking threats away from them. But yeah, entrap's usage is a huge problem for the staff. I just love it so much.
There’s only a few chapters where you really need or want to use it, very strong in those instances tho
I love using it against the chapter 25 thief on the right hand side to keep all the enemies locked up.
@alemfi An easier way to lock it up is to go just in range of the Wyrms and they block the doors. Go back out of range after they attack and the doors remain blocked for the rest of the map.
Obstruct is great I remember bullying marth on his paralog by blocking his path out of the boss room so I could xp farm and get chests
Something i discovered about Obstruct that i haven't seen people post is you can use it to completely divert enemies. If you set up two obstructs with 1 open tile between them, i think the AI sees if it destroys the first ice block the path is still blocked, so if there is another path to your units they will actually walk away from the Obstructed choke. Very helpful if you're getting overwhelmed by enemies.
Note this doesn't work if the two tiles are directly adjacent, i guess because the AI counts them as one path. So if you just put down a micaiah obstruct they will break through it, but maybe if you have a 1- tile wide choke, put down 3 tiles with micaiah and break the middle one it would work
For next FE game they should make it so Staves are limited use *_per map,_* so they don't break, just refresh after the battle. Makes staves like Nodus actually make sense and would be good-feel.
So the 3 Houses approach?
I didn't mind it too much since they were able to limit how many uses you should be able to have per map. I do wish though that some of the spells could have been reworked like Nosferatu for example.
For Nodus, getting Hortensia to proc the skill where staff durability isn’t used is always hype as hell
I know you've said before you wouldn't do an ironman because of the low percentage crits and misses and other bs but it's a really fun challenge and it's just a new way to approach the game and make a new playthrough feel interesting.
Fortify+ is basically the S rank staves from either Blazing Blade or Sacred Stones, but tied to a different durability metric, that being the Engage meter.
I'm like 250 hours in and I'm still finding good tips here
Divine pulse is a cheap way to make staves more accurate, especially for high luck units like Celiné. The major downside is that hit rates now like to you. The upside is that even your regular attacks become more accurate.
Echo + dancing with a team of backups :P.
About entrap, I have used entrap 7 times in my playthrough on paralogs and stuff, I have my first entrap staff at 2 uses because of pure Hort luck
You can abuse pulses for Hortensia's world tree to use Nodus, but actually acquiring one is still a pain
Proccing world tree on nodus is like the most satisfying thing in this game after a Celine sword crit
Favorite combo, break with a staff, then have your warrior 1 shot the enemy due to the extra damage from their passive.
I see... so the knife tier list not having an eating thumbnail was an accident!
omg my girl in the cover pic is way too cute
If each tier dropped one down, it would be a perfect triangle.
I’ve only used the miniature minority of these staves!🤪
yummy treat :3
Entrap was the only way that i found to defeat chrom and robin in madenning
Hey are you going to make a 4 wilds and fell drag twins guide. I'm eager to see how Marnie Zendaya griss compare to the others
silence is not good although still viable in some situations because of how staff hit work. You want to silent those who use magic and they all have high res so it is very counterintuitive.
Offensive staffs are interesting cause I looked it up when I noticed my avoid tank lapis was still getting hit by enemy staff users pretty reliably. And according to some wikis staff hit rate is the hit rate listed on the staff + mag + dex. There is also a separate avoid calculation for staff which is res x 3 + 0.5 × lck. Staff avoid also doesn't get benefit from skills like marth's +avoid but does get terrain bonus to avoid (double for covert) assuming the staff user isn't a mystical.
Which imo makes silence even worse cause most enemy mages will have good res meaning unless you have staff mastery or divine pulse you are almost never going to hit them with silence.
Even if the staff user is mystical they only ignore terrain with tomes (at least that’s what the in-game text would lead me to believe)
reflect is lowkey s tier if you just use it to farm sp and exp but i also do understand that its not the intented use case
Brb spending 90k for a single use staff
mend s tier.
exp is great. especially with micaiah
Reflect can be used to XP farm for crazy amounts of XP on any unit.
Ok S tier
staffs are cool 😎
Nodus is great for trials since it comes back afterwards, otherwise it is easy f tier
Nodus is S tier if you use the glitch lol
Reflect+ holdout?
Random unrelated(ish) question: I'm wanting to do an 8 man run. How many should I deligate to phyical/magic damage carries and how many should be utility? Would like 5 carries to 3 utility be good, or 6 carries to 2 utility?
You can't go wrong with 2-3 damage carry bruisers (Units that can at least survive a single enemy attack during enemy phase) 2-3 tank DPS with speed fixing and rest utility/healer/chainguard/bondedshield
@@IcedCoffeeGamingwhat would DPS mean in this context? Usually that means Damage per second lol
In that context, that means your unga bunga damage dealers. Your Panettes, Ambers, Citrinnes, Ivys and what have you.
@@joshuagabrielcatindig7607thanks!
it's been a hot minute and still no fell xenologue 6? is it that hard or-
I've spent 5 minutes testing some opening moves but haven't attempted it yet. Prioritizing guides/my new early game xenologue maddening unit playthrough which will be upcoming. This DLC drop also delayed my 7 man no DLC run which is the thing I would rather do. I still have some other runs that are on CH23 I need to finish that I haven't gotten around to that weren't for YT content so I remember why I stopped them lmao
lmao makes sense. ngl xenologue 6 is kinda stupid. I'll give you some strategies I personally use once you post the video
Staffs > staves
Does framme know where else those long staffs can fit?
Entrap has 1 great use. Pulling in Tiki so that you don't have to step on the tiles
Making stage 1 sombron less tedious
Nodus has a use for Chapter 6 Fell Xenologue on Maddening. /s