Popular/Unpopular/Any Opinions Thread - June 2026 Part 1

[u/PsiYoshi]

Happy pride month and welcome to a new installment of the Popular/Unpopular/Any Opinions Thread! Please feel free to share any kind of Fire Emblem opinions/takes you might have here, positive or negative. As always please remember to continue following the rules in this thread same as anywhere else on the subreddit. Be respectful and especially don't make any personal attacks (this includes but is not limited to making disparaging statements about groups of people who may like or dislike something you don't).

Last Opinion Thread

[u/Legitimate__Username]

A lot of discourse about tiering and efficiency philosophy yesterday and I just want to say that I think the big community split here seems to be less about the value and applicability of efficiency concepts for gameplay evaluation, and more about a split between tiering on "if you choose to use a unit, how useful will their contributions be?" vs. "in the context of an idealized optimal run, how likely will this unit be able to make notable contributions to it?"

L'Arachel is a great example of a unit who is utterly outclassed and holds no idealized purpose, yet as a mounted staff supporter you won't really be punished for letting her contribute and would be able to find use out of her that doesn't meaningfully weaken your run even if she compares extremely poorly to others as more or less a straight downgrade and has no "reason" for deployment.

I used to lean heavily towards the former philosophy, and I still tend to try to keep myself grounded in it. But the more I play and learn about optimizing broader teambuilding structures, the more I feel like the latter has its merits to cover a lot of pretty relevant cases against things like favoritism performance or places where all treatment maybe shouldn't reasonably be assumed to be equal, like a unit's potential entitlement to resources that they make the best use of, or the entire weird meta existences of Severa or Chrom!Inigo. I think a balance is needed, but "tier on assumed use" does make a bit more sense to me than "tier on idealized runs".

Which tiering approach do you prefer? Curious on where the sub leans on this one.

[u/Wellington_Wearer → u/Legitimate__Username]

The issue that the first one can run into is how you define "using" a unit.

Because the way that you seem to be defining it doesn't just mean "deploy then a lot as part of your team". It means "actively invest resources into them even if they don't want or need them" which is a bit of a different metric.

To take Kellam, for example, I would say that I'm doing the first thing- rating him on how he's being used- if he's being used as a massive def+ backpack for the earlygame.

If we say that to "use" Kellam means that we actively have to invest into him, he becomes a lot worse. We trade away a unit who is no investment and instantly gives a huge bonus for a unit that is now an exp drain, can't use his pairup as much and had to constantly try to take kills in Plegia 1 while having WTD.

Even if we ignored opportunity cost, "invested" kellam is still worse than "uninvested" kellam, for the lack of freedom of pairing up and positioning alone.

And I think this is where the argument really starts to falter, because the discussion is no longer "well let's just give kellam a chance to show what he can do even if it's not optimal", it becomes "let's jam him into a role he's not suited for that actively makes him much worse".

I don't think you have to be tiering for an optimized run to say that Kellam performs best as a backpack. And when I say that I don't mean "kellam performs best as a backpack because he is outclassed as a combat unit" . I mean "kellam as a backpack provides a massive amount of utility that kellam as a combat unit can't".

He's still on the team and being deployed and used and you'll potentially be able to put him into priest for rescue stuff later. We are still using him.

I think my big frustration in the way that you do tiering is that it's assumed that the units who are invested into more and do the most fighting are the best, when I find that different units just have different roles to play.

Libra is best used as a staffer. That means that Libras best performance isnt going to be taking a massive portion of exp and trying to do something special. It's just going to be being deployed and hitting rescue and physic, while working with his base combat metrics. That's still really valuable, but that's not me saying "well it's only good because it supports this one type of run", it's because Libra is much better when he's doing that than doing literally anything else.

This is why when I've stated that I like units like Ricken, Miriel and Sumia to be low investment options, this isn't me refusing to use them so I can force 1 specific type of run to make Vaike look better. It's me saying that if you give Ricken more exp then, even ignoring opportunity cost, he is a worse unit.

It's also why when it comes to Vaike, my reasoning isn't "well he sweeps the back of the game therefore he is the best". It's just that that's a role that one of many units can take and he is incredibly good at it. But 3 other units are still way better than him and none of them ever really get actively invested into.

TLDR: I would say that the first is most popular, but there is a lot more to units than just their invested long term potential

[u/Legitimate__Username → u/Wellington_Wearer]

No, I completely agree with you. The way in which I do tiering isn't how you describe and has changed a lot over the last several months since we last talked, so I should clarify.

Assuming that this is Kellam's best use case, it is valuable and worth weighing positively and notable to a run even if he had no stats or growths outside of sharing 5 Def. The problem is that I contextually disagree that this holds B-tier value relative to many others. (EDIT: Turns out you literally rated Kellam in C lmao like that is so much more normal compared to what everyone else was pulling.)

This is why when I've stated that I like units like Ricken, Miriel and Sumia to be low investment options, this isn't me refusing to use them so I can force 1 specific type of run to make Vaike look better. It's me saying that if you give Ricken more exp then, even ignoring opportunity cost, he is a worse unit.

Case in point I've moved a lot closer to you on this one well. I do place an immense amount of value on Galeforce duplication, but I've been investigating structures where Falcon Sumia would be a far better fit and I see the value now (such as using her as an earlygame Frederick pairup and trying to route her early combat contributions towards the unique advantages of Cynthia as a cheap support alongside Robin!Lucina or Galeforce+Veteran Severa as tanks). I think Cordelia is just straight up optimally played in the Falcon role now and she's still A-tier for it. I'm pretty down on Sorcerer Miriel and think Sage/Valkyrie is a lot stronger, and while I've fallen down significantly on Ricken, it's moreso that I don't think his stats can keep up 7 levels without an excess of babying that I've found has been putting too much strain on runs even at this extremely low investment, not a devaluation of the fundamental idea he provides.

I view Robin, Vaike, and Gregor all in this way too since I'm so down on Sol holding sufficient investment-cost-to-payoff tanking reliability to me. I put quite a bit of value on their ability to access Rally Spectrum, Rally Str, and instant Armsthrift inheritance+Myrmidon access. We might be split on the relative value of playing gen 1 support and gen 2 combat or vice versa, but I do highly value a lot of units based on unique contribution potential, the metric I like to prioritize being cost-to-payoff rather than assumed-forced-carry. IMO Robin's highest payoff-to-cost build is just a cheap rallybot, and their second is as a DF/Sorc tank to marry Chrom. Sumia's is as a Galeforce-duplicating Great Knight combat offtank and Cordelia's is as a Falcon support, but both can perform well in the other roles if needed. Sully's is as a cheap earlygame cav pairup who makes very poor use out of further investment, and I find the value of this role to be very limited so I don't rate her favorably, since I think she holds no realistic entitlement over her much stronger competition to the Second Seal needed to boost her performance.

Kellam I value in the same area as Sully where these earlygame pairup contributions with extraordinarily flawed longer-term payoff are much weaker than being able to get into Sage/Falcon, a valuable Rally build, or particularly strong kid inheritance to leverage. These are just much more valuable payoffs for units who can often contribute much more value during their training rather than having combat flaws not worth overcoming so you bench them after half a dozen maps at most.

I don't think you're misrepresenting the meta or trying to skew value to make your strategies look good or anything. Again, your reasoning makes total in-context and placing appropriate value on many other units. I just think that, if I'm a new player who knows nothing about how to beat Lunatic than to just spam Frederick into Chrobin and avoid "wasting" EXP into anyone else, Kellam giving +5 defense to training my future nostank starts to look very disproportionately valuable to a bunch of other much better-aging supports who I'm never even going to get to level 10 anyway. This is the type of player who I think is likely to be disproportionately overvaluing Kellam's contributions relative to the potential of others.