Hello there.
With Brave Heroes 2 literally on the horizon, I felt it would be a pretty good time to talk about last year's Brave Heroes and the effect they had on the game.
Last year, Intelligent Systems conducted a popularity contest featuring every named character in every Fire Emblem game at that point in time. This contest lasted about a week, and in the end, the winners were reveled to be Ike and Lyn, with Roy and Lucina coming in second. There was a lot of speculation on what the CYL alts of each hero would look like, but many rumors started spreading around, including one where the heroes would be wearing Askrian armor. Eventually, the Brave Heroes banner was released on August 31, 2017, and the contents of said banner exceeded everyone's expectations.
Each of the brave alts had a weapon that granted two effects (a stat boost + a tier 3 version of a skill), and the two 1st place winners each had an exclusive B skill as well as a Lv40 BST that was roughly 4-5 points higher than other units of their range/move type.
Of the four first generation Brave Heroes, Brave Lyn (Blyn) had the most profound effect on the metagame by far. Blyn had the honor of being the first mounted bow user in the game, and had absolutely crazy stats for a ranged cavalry unit, with 33 atk and 35 spd dwarfing all of her competitors at that point. Her prf weapon, the Mulagir, was designed to help deal with bladetome users, having +3 speed and an effect that neutralized field buffs on mages built into it. However, what made Blyn truly one of the most oppressive units in the game was her exclusive B passive, Sacae's Blessing. This skill had the effect of blocking counterattacks by physical melee units, thereby removing one of her otherwise biggest counters (while dragons could still counterattack, they had to cut through her much higher magic bulk).
The combination of her high offensive stats, cavalry movement (and thereby access to cavalry buffs, which were very easy to get), and B passive meant that players had to more or less run specialized checks against her, such as TA Raventome mages. And even so, Blyn could easily run builds or have teammates that could trip such builds. Due to all of this, for the rest of 2017, Blyn was widely regarded as "the single best unit in the entirety of FEH". It wasn't really until the introduction of the weapon refinery and the rise of bulky dragons that Blyn started to become less dominant in the meta, but even to this day, she's still one of the most dangerous units to face in lower arena.
As for Brave Ike (Bike), he wasn't quite as oppressive as Blyn was, but he was a major threat for a while. Unlike Blyn (or the other two, for that matter), his statline leaned more towards a tank, coming with high attack and defense, along with a decent HP pool, but low speed and res. This was complimented by Urvan, an axe that not only lowered the cooldown of Bike's specials by 1, but also reduced the damage of any consecutive attacks to a fifth of what they would normally do, making weapons such as brave weapons nearly useless against him. As if that wasn't enough, Bike also came with a skill called Steady Breath, which not only increased the user's defense when attacked, but it also increased the rate at which specials charged, allowing him to fire off Aether very quickly. And unlike his B passive, this could be given to other units via skill inheritance. His B passive, in contrast, wasn't quite as useful as Blyn's was, only imparting a dull effect against cavalry and flying units.
While the other two came with some interesting effects and niches (Blucina could impart +6 speed in combat buffs to any physical unit, while Broy was the first true hyper offensive sword cavalier), they didn't quite make the same impact the other two did and both ended up getting dropped to the wayside pretty fast.
Now, it remains to be seen how the next generation of brave heroes will shape the metagame, but from what we've seen from Blyn and Bike, we should probably set our expectations high.
That being said, all that's left is to share this pic of the 1st place female winners of both 2017 and 2018 in a... predicament.
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Fire Emblem is (c) 1990-2018 Intelligent Systems
All unit(s) are Lv18 and above.
This pic was drawn by Kupoexe Magnus. View his stuff here.
Have a nice day.
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And now, alt time.
Ballgag:
Blindfold:
Ballgag + Blindfold:
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