One of the most popular requests in the community is being able to do practice runs and fight your friends, so at least that might get implemented at some point to fix the "you barely get to play this mode" problem. Cutthroat doesn't begin to describe this mode though, a couple days back I was like rank 500 pre-reset, and after the next day where I got 2 units killed (ie balance of -40 points achieved) it instantly dropped me to around rank 3500 pre-reset. We're in the home stretch of this season and I screwed up again today (albeit only 1 unit death total) so my final Lift for the season is 3520. Currently floating around rank 400 but it's anyone's guess how many ranks I'll drop in the next ~15 hours before it closes.

I guess I'm not doing too bad myself which probably contributes to me not hating this mode, and I'm not FTP either, but to be fair, pretty much all the units I used these past 2 weeks were units I pulled whether I spent money or not. The ones that got the most use were Reinhardt, Lilina, Leon, Azura and Aversa, with Cecilia, Camus, and Gunnthra making occasional appearances. I kinda enjoy the amount of focus I'm forced to use since every play matters in this mode, and I like that I don't have to sit there spamming Arena Swords or repeatedly doing Assault runs until I happen to roll the right score.

As for the rewards, even if I'm lucky enough to land in Tier 1 this season that means I made a grand total of 65 Grails this week (counting the 20 you get for the third daily reward). Considering the cast size and how costs for units go up to 500 apiece that's just insanely low. I really, really hope this mode won't be an excuse for them to no longer give us free copies of GHB/TT units anymore, but I suspect it will be. Granted, the ever-growing roster makes distributions a bit more unwieldy but they seriously can't expect that this should be a long-term solution to someone wanting to +10 Navarre or some shit considering the opportunity cost, unless they start handing out Grails left and right in other game modes.

Honestly, I wouldn't mind if they just removed Grails from Aether Raids entirely (or just put Grails as all the daily rewards so everyone just gets 100 per season or whatever) and replaced all the rewards with lots and lots of feathers. I don't really think a currency like Grails should be walled behind a mode this competitive, especially when you consider TT/GHB units were often used as great starter units for newcomers anyway.

If I had to rank the meta modes, I'd personally put it down as: Arena >>>>> Aether = Arena Assault.

Arena has a ruthless meta, but its all for Feathers and maybe an extra Orb or two. The big task of the mode is to simply find a claim that you can live with and hold onto that.

Arena Assault is still the shitheap that its been since day 1. The only useful thing it provides is an alternative to certain (Re)GHeB quests since you aren't also being forced to deal with PvE bullshit (not that I needed it to allow Julius to beat Julius for his ReGHeB). Its even worse than Arena since the difference in rewards is greater (1 Orb and 1500 Feathers per week versus 15 Coins and Rocks and 2500 Feathers), you're competing with everyone (versus just with whomever's in your tier) and there's just not enough space in the top tiers for most players to realistically reach (why they haven't further expanded tier sizes yet is likely due to AA being abandonware at this point).

Aether so far hasn't been around long enough to become the daily soulless grind that the other two modes are yet, but at the same token its also the most impenetrable of the three due to being so ruthless and powered by successes within the mode. Once the meta has hardened into its final state for the foreseeable future, I doubt I'll even get a chance to look at the unobtainium that are Grails.


And on that note, you're right that Status Staves are absolute bullshit. Just by switching up my defense team to include Elise supported by a Dancer, I've gone from 'can maybe score a single KO' to 'almost consistently scores a KO and even managed a successful rout all while denying full Aether'. Dazzle really is bullshit and it sucks that its taken me so long to cotton onto this. Edit: That was yesterday. Today was full of nothing but watching my Defense team uselessly plink off of the +10 uber Dragons after getting debuffed to hell through Aversa cheeze as the enemy just casually waltzes through me. Not even one foe from today's matches took even meaningful damage from my team. This mode just fucking sucks.

I also had a rather luck based win earlier today as it was almost entirely due to the fact that I had the fortune to keep Drive Spd on Eliwood, which enabled Bonkers to bait the enemy Aversa and not get doubled and killed in the act (the Iote's Shield seal was on the enemy +10 Myrrh; an unmerged 5 star Level 40 Aversa was able to tank a 49 Str + effective damage hit and both hit hard enough and fast enough to double in retaliation to level a unit not completely defenseless in Res). Thanks to this, I was able to eliminate the risk of eating some Wings of Mercy bullshit as I slowly picked off the two Quick Retort + Steady Breath/Fury +10 Dragons (Myrrh and Nowi) and one Quick Retort + Heavy Blade AssTiki with my team of +5 Eliwood, Narcian, Bonkers and +1 Micaiah (Miccy was pretty useless all things considered since she wasn't tanking or dropping nothing on her own).

Without that Seal, I'm very sure that battle would've been doomed to failure as I wouldn't have been able to pick off Aversa before the Wall of Dragons marched down the field, and any attempts at trying to drop a Dragon would've put it below 50% HP and activated Aversa snipa which would've eliminated my Color coverage and any chance of a successful rout.


Having posted the above, I'm pretty sure that I'm going to change my ranking once this mode fully gets underway.


Edit: Here are three easy steps to fixing Aether Raidys. 1) Reduce all Grail values to 1/10th of their current value, 2) Replace all non-Arena Arena Medal rewards with Grails of 50% of listed amounts or more (alternatively Universal Crystals for 5% of listed value or greater), and 3) Allow players who do not wish to participate to fully disengage with this mode (i.e. delete all offensive and defensive stats, builds, investments, etc). And there you have it. A perfect mode for Whales to wallow in while being totally ignoreable at no sizeable cost to those not willing to blow their second mortgage on this shit mobage. And anybody who enacts otherwise should be drug out into the street and shot (as there's no fixing a mode that literally punishes failure with more failure and fewer opportunities to even interact with said mode, while allowing others to profit at your increasingly helpless expense).

Finished Season 2 of The Expanse...about 2 hours too late to get it in before my subscription renewed. :P Thankfully I was able to get a refund. Show was great, though, I can hardly wait to see what happens in season 3. Only complaint I'm having is that it actually dampens my spirits in terms of space explorations, because it reminds me that no matter what great heights humanity might accomplish, politicians and greedy fuckfaces will always find a way to ruin everything.

Valkyria Chronicles 4

This is slow-going, but I'm basically finished with it.  It's pretty much the perfect sequel to VC1 and the story is actually better than I expected.  There are some "morally gray" themes that actually aren't completely mishandled, which is nice for an "anime" RPG.

I have to admit that the Valkyria formula of throwing greater and greater odds at you for you to overcome really stresses me out, but it does feel good when you finally overcome them.  It's just tough starting another battle after finishing one.

Valkyria 4 does an excellent job of balancing its new class, Grenadiers, even though at times it does feel like they're a little overpowered.  However, rarely does it ever feel like it's balanced against the player.  Once you learn to think around Grenadiers, they're almost always an advantage for you.  I just made sure I prioritized the killing of all enemy Grenadiers as soon as possible, heh.

One thing that VC4 really does better than VC1 is in its Squaddies.  The recruitable characters here ALL have their own (optional) story chapters that you unlock by using them in battle.  It's something VC1 was begging for, since it had such interesting and well designed "generic" units.  So to see VC4 really step up to the plate in this area was fantastic.

I don't have many real complaints with the game.  One is that the interface is still stuck in 2007, like the original.  The other is that the "true" ending is locked behind beating the final boss on Hard mode, which is kind of a dealbreaker for me.  Other than that, this is about as perfect as VC1!

FINAL SCORE:
9/10

Up Next: Octopath Traveler?