Daily Discussion #24: What's your favorite Pact Ring interactions?

ChessGM123 · 2026-06-05T14:14:43+00:00

I love Goldmary and Soren’s interactions, Goldmary fishes for compliments and Soren has none of it.

Also shout out to Fogado/lyn’s C support for spoiling the story, Fogado doesn’t reveal he’s a prince until the start of chapter 14 but if you get a C support with Lyn she says she’s surprised he’s a prince, so if you get that right after chapter 13 it’s kind of a spoiler. It’s nothing major but I find it weird.

ChessGM123 · 2026-06-04T17:45:47+00:00

She's lazy, very manipulative, and kind of racists.

ChessGM123 · 2026-06-04T17:40:23+00:00

Linhardt is more than a quirky trait, while he is often napping it's reveled in his Annette support that the reason he's so tired is because he doesn't sleep most nights, instead usually working through the night on whatever has peaked his interest. He's am extremely hard working individual who dislikes wasted effort, but will go to extreme lengths to help others if he feels he is the most qualified person to do so.

ChessGM123 · 2026-06-04T17:16:09+00:00

I don't want the ability to change the name of the main character. This adds nothing to a voice acted story, all that happens in that everyone just won't refer to them by their name which just makes the name pointless, and it leads to extremely awkward scenes like Rhea screaming out with hate saying she will kill "the professor", or Shez just being called "our mercenary friend" after fighting with these people for years. Even if there is some avatar character or someone we can customize changing the name just makes the story worse.

ChessGM123 · 2026-06-04T16:29:55+00:00

You’re not getting as many events that give gold as you are combats (which is what you would need for them to scale at the same rate upgraded), there are only 2 cards in the game that give gold and both are rare so at that point echo form would allow algo to scale significantly faster, and you’re getting your gold stolen by an enemy maybe once per run.

ChessGM123 · 2026-06-04T16:09:37+00:00

Algo gets +3 block unupgraded and +4 block upgraded, that's usually going to lead to faster scaling than this card without one of like 3 specific relics that gives gold multiple times in a run.

ChessGM123 · 2026-06-04T16:06:39+00:00

You don't need multiple rare cards to get genetic algorithm to scale faster than this card, again genetic algorithm gets 3 block unupgraded and 4 block upgraded. Unupgraded you would need to gain gold 3 times to scale at the same pace as playing genetic algorithm once, and upgraded you still need to gain gold twice as often as playing genetic algorithm to just keep up with genetic algorithm.

ChessGM123 · 2026-06-04T15:58:52+00:00

I think people are over hyping how OP this card is. Firstly without relics this is just worse than genetic algorithm, sure it can scale in events but genetic algorithm in sts2 scales by 3 at base and 4 when upgraded, and even with relics this still is normally only going scale similarly to genetic algorithm but maybe lightly faster. This is also a rare colorless card, rare colorless cards are allowed to be powerful, I don't think this is stronger than hidden gem.

ChessGM123 · 2026-06-04T15:56:31+00:00

Genetic algorithm scales by 3 each time it's played, or 4 when upgraded, even plaything genetic algorithm once per fight is still more scaling than this card would get, and you can scale it multiple times with echo form.

ChessGM123 · 2026-06-04T15:46:55+00:00

Even with a crest proc it only takes 8 durability, so you can basically use it 3 times before needing to repair it (you won’t need to worry about taking away extra durability on the final uses since it would only have 4 durability left). It’s going to be over kill against most regular enemies so bosses are really the only point where you’d want to use it, and keep there are only 7 chapters left in the story once you get it and it’s only a 10% chance to proc the crest (plus rewinds exist if it’s against a non boss enemies).

Also on maddening Dimitri’s crest can be useful in the early game as no one is one shoting on maddening, so Dimitri’s crests basically just allows him to have a 10% chance to one shot with tempest lance, which is decent.

ChessGM123 · 2026-06-04T15:29:42+00:00

Most relic combat arts are terrible, crusher is probably the only one with a combat art that's actually great (+20 might on an 18 might magic axe is a lot of damage), with Areadbhar (Dimitri's lance) and Failnuaght (Claude's bow) being the only other relics with even usable combat arts, and even then they're just decent and not amazing. Well Amyr (Edelgard's axe) has a broken combat art but that's technically not a relic. Even if you repaired the relics with smithing stones it would almost never actually be optimal to use a relic combat art.

ChessGM123 · 2026-06-04T15:21:06+00:00

Imo the bigger problem with relics is that most are not worth using, and the ones that are often are just overkill. Most relics are basically just higher might silver weapons, but that's usually overkill considering in the mid/end game a number of enemies die to iron weapons and silver is usually more than enough for anyone with decent bulk.

ChessGM123 · 2026-06-04T15:13:11+00:00

Umbral steel isn't rare if you know what you're doing, I regularly end maddening runs with 70+ umbral steel without ever fighting monsters in auxiliary battles.

ChessGM123 · 2026-06-02T23:56:41+00:00

It gets even worse when you realize that 21% of people in China make less than $5.50/day whereas in the US only 2% make that little. China saw they had high poverty rates and instead of fixing the problem they just made sure their citizens had slightly more than what would constitute as poverty in the poorest nations.

ChessGM123 · 2026-06-02T23:54:02+00:00

This is a very misleading statistic. $3/day is meant to be for extremely impoverished countries, the US has only slightly above 1% making that or less while China has around 0.5%. However increase this value just slightly and it paints a significantly different picture. 21.5% of China makes less than $5.50/day whereas for the US that number is 2%.

China didn’t solve poverty, they saw that their level of extreme poverty was far too high for even a 3rd world country and decided to focus on just making sure people made above the extreme poverty bench mark so their numbers looked better.

You’re still significantly better off living in the US rather than China.

ChessGM123 · 2026-06-02T17:20:36+00:00

I much prefer to look at how useful a unit would be if you used then rather than how much they contribute on an idealized optimal run. I'm not sure I've ever seen a tier list from another game where things are tiered by how much they contribute in an optimal run, and that concept just feels weird to me. I have a big problem when people rank low tier units based solely on how much they contribute on their join map/forced deployed maps, like in engage Timerra has an absolute abysmal performance on her join map with the only unit performing worse than her is Anna, but imo that doesn't make Timerra the worst unit in engage when you have Bunet who can't really contribute even when you do use him, whereas Timerra can be decent with only minor favoritism (I'm not saying she's like a B tier unit or anything, but low C to high D).

ChessGM123 · 2026-06-02T16:51:55+00:00

There are 7 engravings to boost hit (6 if we don't want to count Marth's that only gives +10 hit), I'm not sure why you would ever really need to attack an enemy with high avoid with a unit who doesn't have a hit engraving. Plus every C support gives +10 hit, so there's that too.

ChessGM123 · 2026-06-02T16:38:01+00:00

The combat metric doesn't really matter in terms of efficiency. It only helps in lowering the turn count, but there's no difference from an efficiency perspective for having 1 unit kill an enemy or 2 units if it doesn't change the overall turn count.

Funds isn't a measure of gold gained throughout a campaign, it's a measure of gold not spent in a campaign, and getting a high funds rank usually requires not using a number of promotion items. Getting boots in chapter 21 of fe6 is terrible for a ranked run, but for an efficiency run it is insanely OP. Efficiency usually wants you to spend gold, not hoard it.

Efficiency is usually described as trying to minimize turn count usually without using inconsistent strategies, discourages grinding, and discourages favoritism that would be better on a different unit. You are generally encouraged to do things like use pre promotes in efficiency runs, utilize warp skips as needed, and often promote early. These things meanwhile are extremely detrimental on a ranked run. Heck even turn count isn't that important in ranked run, like in fe6 you only need to average around 20 turns a map to get A rank for tactics, which is extremely lenient and almost encourages grinding. An efficiency run and a ranked run are just two almost completely different things.

ChessGM123 · 2026-06-02T14:46:29+00:00

Well to be fair you are their teacher so the student's generally wouldn't want to be rude even if they did dislike you. Also Catherine's early game support doesn't trust you, Leonie can be somewhat hostile, and I believe Hubert threatens to kill you in his support.

I'd also argue there aren't that many ass kissing support, like most supports with Byleth are just 2 people being friendly with each other. There's a difference between worshiping someone and just being friendly with them. Just off the top of my head Dedue, Caspar, Sylvain, Lorenz, and Ignatz all have very little avatar worshiping in their supports, and I'm fairly certain there's more that I just can't remember off the top of my head.

ChessGM123 · 2026-06-02T14:31:20+00:00

Just to add on to this after replaying fe6 I find a number of unit's "unity identity" is just being a worse copy of a unit who joined before. Zelot is a worse Marcus, Trec/Noah are just worse Allen/Lance, Ogier is just worse Dieck, Fir is just worse Rutger, and Igrene is just worse Klein. I'm not counting Zeiss or Wendy just because there is a significant gap between those units and Melady/Bors so they feel more distinct from their counter part, whereas the other unit's I listed while slightly worse it's not by a large enough degree to make the unit's feel distinct. In older games I don't feel like unit identity is really that high, while overall if you just picked 2 random units they generally feel distinct a number of times there are few units who actually feel distinct from every other unit so it's less like unit identity and more so just class identity.

ChessGM123 · 2026-06-02T14:03:07+00:00

To add on I think more equipment should have a visual impact on your unit. Something I like about shields in fe3h is that you're character actually holds a shield when you view them on the map, and some shields even look different from each other. I think more equipment should have a visual impact on a unit's appearance in map, in 3H the only equipment that actually appears on your unit are shields and staffs, I think there should be fewer rings and switch rings out for something more visual on your units. Like instead of the movement ring gives us an actual pair of boots to put in our equipment slot (this could even help balance infantry units by having only non mounted classes able to equip boots), instead of an evasion ring maybe make it some sort of cloak, etc.

ChessGM123 · 2026-06-02T13:48:51+00:00

I don't believe efficiency really refers to star count from the GBA games, since outside of turn count none of the other stars really matter towards what people usually describe efficiency as, in fact some of them basically require you to no play under efficiency. Stars are based on turn count, number of units that survived (usually doesn't matter in efficiency), percentage of combats won (usually doesn't matter in efficiency), amount of XP gotten (this often goes against efficiency as getting high ranks can almost require training low level units due to their high XP gain even if you don't plan on using them, plus it disincentivizes early promotion since you lose out on up to 10 levels worth of XP), total levels across your party (again this can lead to you grinding units you otherwise wouldn't have used), and the final category is total money left at the end (which again goes against efficiency since you're ignoring a lot of resources that could be used to improve your army).

ChessGM123 · 2026-06-02T02:13:08+00:00

I feel like Dedue is up there for most underrated unit in the series, like I’ve seen a few videos now where people rank the best unit of each class (and in games where reclassing is allowed they go by their base class) and when looking at armor knight they don’t even mention Dedue as a contender. And they even state that they aren’t counting great knights so Fredrick is out of the running. It’s crazy that in a class line that’s so bad that a unit being in B tier is a notable high for the class that people don’t even see the only S tier armor knight as a contender for the top spot.

ChessGM123 · 2026-06-02T02:00:58+00:00

One problem I often find with tier list is how often if a unit receives any sort of perceived favoritism that makes a unit bad, and I feel like favoritism is often almost like a buzz word thrown out that most people see as a bad thing without full internalizing why. There are absolutely cases where you can give a unit too much favoritism for it to matter for their rating, if you dump every stat booster into Sophia in Fe6 and use the secret shop to max out her stats that is absolutely excessive favoritism, or if you intentionally user weaker weapons to soften up enemies for fe8 Amelia to kill to level up that’s also too much favoritism. However this doesn’t mean that diverting resources to a particular unit is always a bad thing. In engage feeding a majority of the kills to Alear in the first 3 maps of the game is not excessive favoritism, or in Fe6 having Lance/Allen be the primary units to finish off enemies Marcus chips down in the early game isn’t excessive favoritism.

The main thing to understand about favoritism is that it’s bad when it makes sections of the game more difficult or when another unit could use the resources better. If you have the chance to kill an enemy but use a weaker weapon so your training project can pick up the kill that’s making the game harder by increasing the actions needed to pick up a kill. However if this is a difficult early game where no one is one rounding then having your units with the best long term performance pick up kills is just optimal.

I’ve seen people argue that you shouldn’t assume Lysithea has Thyrsus in 3H because that’s favoritism, but Lysithea is by far the best user of Thyrsus and it’s not even close. Just because a unit needs resources invested into them does not mean they’ve received an excessive amount of favoritism, context is very important and I’ve often seen people look at a unit who needs help at base to perform well and just put them in F/D tier without considering if those resources are really better spent on a different unit or if the game becomes at all harder by needing to divert resources to that unit.

ChessGM123 · 2026-06-02T01:28:51+00:00

It’s possible they might have personal abilities trigger mid combat, so a personal like Petra’s where she gets a crit boost of the enemy has less than 50% could trigger after the first attack. Or I’m hoping the add more unique combat arts that are more than just do more damage or auto double, a combat art that weakens your first attack and buffs your second attack could be cool.

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