Null Follow-Up and the Direction of the Game

The more I analyze this skill, the more I think that it's going to have a huge impact on the meta. There's a lot of ground I haven't been able to cover, but I wanted to offer you all something with a few hours before the Feh channel broadcasts. I welcome your feedback, and I encourage everyone to discuss this skill and use our creativity with it more.

I've organized my commentary in four parts: the skill itself, the meta in general, arena, and the game at large.

***If it's too much to read, I've put some ** on the parts I think most people won't want to miss.

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I. The Skill Itself
The first thing to be cleared up, since I see some misunderstanding of it, is that it is not like Thunder Armads or Great Flame; it does not block opponent doubles unless they are forced doubles. If you are slow, fast units will still double you. It also does not block vantage or desperation like hardy bearing - these skills change the order of attacks but not the number, so if you were already hitting twice you will still hit twice and null follow-up will not change that.

This skill is not game-breaking; if anything, it is game-making. It creates options for dealing with nonsense like bold fighter or Garm. It forces opponents to play by the rules, and it hogs the B-slot so you can't use it with bold or vengeful fighter. You can use it with the QR seal, but only on one unit.

***Generally, I find that the skill's optimal usage is quite narrow. It is important mainly against player-built units, many of which will use bold fighter or QR or other forced doubles to pursue a ORKO. In PvE, forced doubles are relatively rare outside an occasional unit with QR (and even those are uncommon) and Hardin's bold fighter. W.Lissa, L.Tiki, and H.Kagero are not regulars in PvE content. So its usage is mostly in pseudo-PvP modes, and I think the units that benefit most from this skill are fast debuffers such as Legault and M.Morgan (probably Jaffar and Sothe as well) as well as light breath / dark breath debuffers with enough spd to avoid natural doubles from enemies.

For more details, see my comment here https://fireemblem.gamepress.gg/q-a/null-follow#comment-959601

***One other very potent use is on glass cannons in arena def, where it can actually be extremely deadly because one-and-done builds are perfectly fine there. Someone like Sothe, who can survive a single counterattack from most units if he doesn't use L&D (and especially if he uses C duel), is actually very dangerous with this skill and a WoM dancer. He will hit you twice, steal all your stats, and if you survive, the dancer shows up and he hits you again with the buff/debuff in effect. (Or the dancer might just finish you off himself/herself, or even something like death blow 4 M.Grima with WoM, which, by the way, scores optimally.) He can use flashing blade as a seal to make sure he charges moonbow/glimmer even if you use guard, or he can even use the poison strike seal, which basically says "I'm so confident I will 2RKO you that I'm going to telegraph it." It's not an appropriate build for most PvE or GC, and I think his bulk is a bit thin to do it in arena offense, but if you see this in arena defense, you would be right to be scared.

There are also some niche tries such as with firesweep bow to deny bowbreaker or with firesweep sword with similar ideas. With firesweep bow it's still rough because most bowbreaker mages use raven+TA so you wouldn't get much damage anyways, and with firesweep sword, swordbreaker is probably good enough to get the job done because you're not worried about QR doubles anyways and somewhere around a third to a half of units using swordbreaker are swords themselves, plus you secure doubles against Karla and Mia and Ayra and Lon'qu.

L.Ephraim galeforce builds probably prefer this B-skill. That way he can keep his atk a bit lower to avoid OHKOs, and if he can't take them down in two hits, galeforce activates and he hits a third time. Also, he denies wary fighter and the rare lancebreaker.

Roy can potentially make pretty good use of this skill because he's fast enough to deny natural doubles from most bold fighters and infantry dragons. But you won't get a one-round aether without an infantry pulse, and fast dragons are becoming more numerous so guard might be safer anyways.

I could also imagine maybe some build along the lines of wo dao + flashing blade + aether. The one-round might fail without aether, so nullify follow-up might be used to deny a QR double until a singer/dancer can help the unit activate aether.

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II. The Meta in General
***Since this skill turns the tables on units who like to throw spd out the window, the obvious thing that this skill will do is make spd more important ("make spd great again"). I think the biggest winners are fast debuffers with some bulk such as Legault and M.Morgan, followed by fast tanks like, 35-42 spd. The fastest units will not find this skill as relevant to them because they tend to need desperation, and they were always reliant on natural doubles which null follow-up will not block, and they tended to one-round QR tanks on their own player phase so that the QR double never happened anyways. The biggest losers, of course, are units that are dependent on forced doubles and who have no spd, which is over 50% of armours and most of the older dragons. (Newer dragons such as F.Kana, the recent Tiki alts and probably both of the new Corrins tend to be fast, probably in anticipation of this skill.)

Fast debuffers I will discuss in the section on arena.

Let's look at fast tanks, who appreciate this skill greatly as an answer to the cheap tricks armours use. First, let's understand what the issue was. Fast tanks are slightly slower than the fastest units in the game (by 4 points ideally) and may have somewhat lower atk than the hyper-speedsters, who have offensive aims, all while having better defenses. They are significantly faster than slow tanks, who give up on spd to go heavy on def and protect themselves from specials using guard. The idea is that instead of having colossal def, they take one hit less and avoid the big special that would occur on a follow-up, because most units double into their special rather than opening with it. The advantages included not needing to use guard, so that something like QR could go in the B-slot, having some player phase ability, and being able to continue tanking even if guard or QR falls because that's their worst case scenario and they're still trading single hits with hyper-aggressive units. All of this falls apart against bold fighter because a unit that dumped all its spd in favour of atk and def could now double into a gigantic bonfire or ignis. Even if the tank's slightly lower def (compared to a slow tank) could withstand two hits, which often is the case, it cannot withstand a big special added on top. Fast tanks put their faith in the fundamental principle of opportunity cost on which the balance of the game depends - "If you dump your spd, you shouldn't be able to double me" - and bold fighters were defiling it with impunity.

Now there's actually something the fast tank can do about it beside give up and behave like a slow tank with guard. It is perhaps regrettable that such a mechanism is necessary in the first place, because spd was supposed to free the B-slot up from using guard in favour of something like QR and now the B-slot still isn't free because we need this thing to shut down the cheaters. Null follow-up feels somewhat like a bandage solution for the brokenness of bold fighter just as duel skills are a non-solution to how bogus the scoring system is. However, it is a superior bandage because of its potential on other units and because there's a second function to it. Spd tanks who can't one-round a vengeful/QR tank can now initiate into vengeful fighters (or bold fighters with QR) and take a good chunk out of them and walk away with a good amount of HP. In theory, this was always possible on enemy phase as long as you weren't dealing with a unit with forced doubles on both phases, but in practice there was stuff like the baited unit getting repositioned out so that you couldn't finish them.

***There's one other thing to be said about not being able to open up the B-slot despite not needing guard. The most obvious choice and the one I always went to was QR, which, like bold fighter, is a way of breaking the rules. Only that it isn't nearly as broken as bold fighter because it's relatively easy just to avoid attacking into a unit with QR and the HP requirement is stringent and it doesn't give free special charges for no reason. But maybe it's time to admit that it is kind of cheating and start working for doubles. Moreover, if glass cannons or glass cannon-ish units on arena def will start showing up with null follow-up themselves, QR isn't even going to be that good anymore so def/res link or vantage might be better.

***We might even find ourselves in some kind of funny poker-ish situation with null follow-up. Poker professionals will sometimes make decisions which on the surface are losing, just to keep their opponents a bit more honest. (((ex: you can skip this example, but if you want to know why I compare it to poker, read the example. Consider this situation: I think my opponent could have 3 possible hands, and my hand loses to 2 of them. The pot is $5, and my opponent bets $1. If I call and I win, $6 for me; if I call and I lose, I lose $1. If I call 3 times in the same exact situation, two of his hands will beat me and one will lose, so I lose 2 x $1 = $2 and I win $6. So I should call all three times even though I lose twice, because I can't know when he has which of those three hands. If my opponent is a good player and knows that I know how to think like this, I need to call even though I will lose more often than I win. Otherwise, if my opponent is smart, he will notice that I keep folding and start betting $1 at me with more hands that would lose to mine because I will fold anyways.))) The same thing might happen with null follow-up, maybe more in GC than on arena def. If too many fast tanks give up on QR in favour of guard or vantage or def/res link because units like Sothe are going to use null follow-up anyways, then the Sothe types might try to exploit it by switching to special spiral or desperation or escape route or chill def or guard or even some kind of dual seal (ex: seal def/res is available on Ares for 20k feathers and might work with Clarisse's bow). Then the fast tanks will notice and start using QR again, and at some point we might reach an equilibrium where we see both builds with null follow-up and builds without. The same thing can happen in the dance of meta between armours and fast tanks. If armours start abandoning bold and vengeful fighter right left and centre in favour of special fighter, fast tanks might say "aha!" and start switching to def/res link or vantage. Armour players might notice and start reincorporating bold and vengeful fighter, and we go into the same back-and-forth.

The other possibility, which is more likely on arena def, is that units like Sothe are just going to say "I'll just use nullify follow-up + flashing blade 100% of the time because I know it's a high-percentage play (i.e. high rate of success)" and they won't switch even if they know the meta has shifted towards special fighter because they're satisfied with the results. And maybe vantage will become more popular, and hardy bearing will start showing up on Sothes, and they might stick to it even if def/res link becomes the most popular B-skill just to cover the minority that sticks to vantage.

Now, let's forget a moment all of this dancing around trying to negotiate the meta. One type of build that we might start seeing more belongs to a semi-passive style that contents itself to blocking opponent doubles. Consider this build:
Barst +spd -res
Wo Gun+spd
Swap
Ignis
Brazen atk/def
Nullify follow-up
Atk smoke
Spd/def 2
Stats on map: 51HP, 47/40/32/13
This build will double more than a few units, but its main point is not to murder as it is to exchange hits. 54 atk with the brazen active is respectable but not intimidating without a special. However, he does achieve 39 def with atk smoke on top of it, and he can then exchange hits without fear of some vengeful ignis or some bold fighter doubling into an ignis against him. He can also trade hits with other units in his spd range who may or may not be using QR. He's not afraid to go chip that fast red mage so that your slow tank can finish her off in one hit because the bold fighter covering that mage won't get the better of him. He gives up the opportunity to use wrath (which might make noontime quite usable) or renewal for sustain; in exchange, he gets freedom on both phases. This way you can get some rich, complex positions with full teams of 4+ members colliding at once without everything dying in one turn.

There's a principle difference between such a build and steady breath+QR fast Nowi. The former is a dual phase build; steady breath + QR is an enemy phase build. More importantly, Nowi intends to do most of her work using QR and targeting the lower defensive stat of most opponents, and aether becomes important as a means of maintaining QR. Barst can actually switch, for example, to slaying + aether or even hack'o'lantern + aether and also have better sustain by giving up the massive ignis for blasting through a target at a key moment. Either way, I expect the Barst type of setup, whether aether variants or more aggressive variants, to grow in popularity more than the QR setups.

***Now let's look at slow tanks. For them it's especially important to differentiate between PvE, main arena, and other pseudo-PvP modes. In PvE, you're not going to see null follow-up on every other unit so QR is still good; you can generally play as before. In main arena, you probably don't want to use QR because killing the opponent wouldn't be good and bonus units will probably lose QR after fighting 1-2 opponents. So that leaves AA and GC. Here QR maybe loses some value the same way it lost value when B.Veronica entered the game. Take, for example, the Sothe strategy that I offered in the first section. And I think you will indeed see nullify follow-up on Sothe because C duel infantry is a thing and people are going to use him in their arena teams with nullify follow-up. It's not a case where nobody would put it on him because arena def is the only use for this skill on him and there are cheaper ways to play arena def. So it may be a better option for a slow tank to focus on being very solid and passive and unbreakable, protecting player phase units who are more aggressive. One alternative is to take a brave weapon for when stuff like Sothe shows up. (300SP weapons score the same as 350SP weapons if your assist costs 300SP or 400SP and B, C, and S all cost 240SP).

About a month ago, shortly after the Halloween units were revealed, I said that player phase is becoming more and more important, and I said that IS is going to release something that messes with units that rely on forced doubles. ( https://fireemblem.gamepress.gg/q-a/some-comments-direction-game-and-meta ) In fact, they have fulfilled my prediction far earlier than I expected, and in far more direct and generalizable a manner than I imagined they would. This B-skill is inheritable at least to other infantry, and likely to other movement types as well, and it quite blatantly says that it disables anything that grants free doubles.

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III. Arena
I'd like to state this up front. I still consider arena to be a bogus mode. The reasons I explain in the link below haven't changed, most importantly that it is not a test of skill so much as it is a test of your ability to pull. https://fireemblem.gamepress.gg/q-a/updated-thoughts-new-arena-pt1-whats-wrong-arena

That being said, for being bogus and also absurd because units are forced out of their roles, IS is starting to develop enough tools that the mode is becoming less and less absurd. Duel skills enable units to spam BST and SP using the one slot that tends to be irrelevant to their support role. C duel infantry, where most of the best f2p-mergeable support units are, has come first after the first two duel skills. Null follow-up allows units to block bold fighter, QR, and vengeful fighter, making chip damage strategies many times more playable.

Moreover, there's actually half a logic to some of the ways SP and BST affect the meta. Positioning assists and healing assists are all more powerful or easier to play with than dual rally+, which scores higher in SP; savage blow is also one of the best skills (especially on Jaffar) but it also carries a small scoring penalty for most units (and for all units using two of it) because it isn't 240SP. Fortress def/res and death blow 4 are better than duel skills, but on most units the resulting score will be lower. However, if they wanted to be consistent with this line, then level 2 skills should score better than level 3 skills because they're less powerful and some 4mt weapon that the character learns at 1* should score better than a prf, and an empty slot should score highest of all. So the scoring system is still bogus. (Also, whales can probably still whale their way out of having to deal with dancers because dancers still can't score above 170BST and dance is only 150SP, which is 2-3 SP bins below the 400SP rallies. So they can get out of dealing with WoM dancer + C duel Sothe. Again, arena is more about your ability to pull than about skill, not that skill and strict discipline with orbs can't keep a long-time f2p into T21, as Akariss proves.)

***Infantry dragons have regained a place in the meta. For the past month or so I have been replying to questions about Nowi saying that I'm not convinced of her worth as a merge project now that L.Tiki is here and stronger than Nowi+7 without any merges of her own and Nowi not even being an especially good support unit. Now that it's so much easier to use light breath + double smokes for support, I find Nowi, Fae, and F.Corrin to be very reasonable choices for main arena, though I'd say they're still risky investments because L.Tiki still eclipses Nowi and F.Corrin (and can actually max her SP score even if she switches out her weapon), and now that H.Myrrh also showed up with potential 180BST, some green dragon will probably come along to eclipse Fae as well. So you would be merging pretty much just for arena score, which I would advise against. It's still pretty absurd as a game.
But people are going to do it because Nowi and Fae have reputations as good units.
Also, both of the new Corrins have prfs, which means they can score better than Wendy and Sheena if they use duel skills.

Dazzling staff has lost a little of its dominance. The problem with windsweep and watersweep was that the other side of the spectrum is always left open, and dazzling staff covers everything without even blocking your own double. Now, however, units that can take a hit or two, especially daggers, will start inflicting all manner of havoc on the opponent.

***Generally speaking, I think the way arena gets played is going to change a lot. It is now possible, by spamming a lot of defensive buffs, that someone like Legault can take three or even four hits. Fully merged, his defenses can go well into the 30s with some buffs, and with C duel and a weapon refine, he has somewhere around 49HP. That could very well survive at least two hits, quite possibly three, maybe four with atk ploy support. If there's infantry flash on the team, his atk is pretty low so he can maybe even afford to sneak an aether off on someone, in which case he can very likely survive four hits. So I think the strategy will become increasingly popular to run a bunch of defensive buffs (which is already being done) and add some dagger work.

***There is some possibility that the entire meta is moving into an era where the ORKO will not be more common than it was in original FE games. You may no longer be able to one-round glass cannons using QR, and they might be too fast to double naturally. WoM dancers aren't going away. So...? Maybe tanks, both fast and slow, will switch away from QR in favour of guard, and focus on survival while leaving offense to player phase units? Maybe brave weapons experience a resurgence in the meta? Maybe vantage becomes more common? Then some of the glass cannons with nullify follow-up will start using hardy bearing instead of poison strike? Maybe OHKO strategies become more popular because of special spiral? It's all speculation at this point, but I do think huge changes are coming.

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IV. The game at large
***It looks to me like a good time to be in the game. The meta is going to get overturned, and we might get that poker-like back and forth dance that I described in the section on meta. That will make the game interesting. IS suggests with null follow-up that they are investing development resources into addressing serious balance issues in the game and opening up a lot more space for diversity and nuance in strategy. Dataminers have even found some part of a skill which reduces enemy special charge (like guard) which has yet to be used on any existing skill, which means IS will also introducing ways to deal with the recent powercreep in the form of excessive amounts of extra special charges via special fighter and special spiral, i.e. more work along the lines of what witchy wand does. All of which means that IS is actually addressing some serious balance issues

***I've also noticed that a lot of the recent updates, although they have been highly relevant to arena play, are also highly relevant elsewhere. For example, fortress def/res is a great option for people who already got Sheena and/or Gwendolyn +10 with +spd, both of whom do not benefit from duel skills, but it's good on a lot of units such as Beruka and Azama. I don't imagine that it was easy for IS to develop skills which are highly relevant both in main arena and in more normal modes, so I also find this aspect encouraging. It gives us reason to expect more developments which aren't just more whale bait.

***That said, IS has also shown that money is one of their focuses and that arena is the way they intend to rake it in. They have not been releasing new game modes despite the widespread outcry for one; they have just released more and more units, many of which are quite obviously meant for arena use in one way or another. The most salient developments since the Halloween banner (which is when I released my last commentary on the direction of the game) are C duel infantry, fortress def/res 3, blue flame, null follow-up, and non-seasonal availability of candlelight+ (in the form of flash+) and infantry rush. C duel infantry, fortress def/res, and blue flame came on a banner with only 3 focus units so that they are reasonably easy to snipe for. In these units IS has basically made a bunch of equipment for people to buy to play in a contest that's won mainly by spending (or by being in the game for long enough) rather than by skill.

Sadly, this means that a legit PvP or pseudo-PvP mode is not likely to appear soon. IS has spent their development time on making arena less of a joke (and to their credit, it's working, as I explained in the previous section), but that's development time they're not spending on a mode that isn't riddled with fudge factors like BST and SP. More importantly, they have signalled quite clearly that their intention is to get people to spend on arena equipment, whether +10 on 180BST units (on a legendary banner and a 4-focus unit banner no less) or duel skills or nullify follow-up (again on a 4-focus unit banner), and if they make a legit mode, it's going to make arena look so bad that people are going to ditch arena faster than a whale can fork over $1000 for H.Myrrh+10, and that will put a huge dent in their income. (And as I explain here, I think we can conclude that they're in it for money above all else https://fireemblem.gamepress.gg/q-a/updated-thoughts-new-arena-pt2-what-we-do-about-it ) There is a very narrow possibility that we will indeed get such a mode with or close to the 3.0 update (possibly even tonight), but it is so narrow that I'm going to proceed on the assumption that it's not happening. Also, if they do intend to make a real PvP mode, nullify follow-up might be a very important piece, because real PvP is nearly impossible when everything is one-rounding everything else.

Since the new units have been revealed already, I think that takes them off the agenda for Feh channel. In the video announcing 2.0 about a year ago, Feh got through the announcement of Farfetched Heroes and Joshua by the 3:40 mark, and tomorrow I think she'll be capable of getting through the new weapon refines by 4:00 or 4:30 at the latest, which means we still have 8-9 minutes. 1 minute will probably be Feh being a fourth-rate derp, and maybe 2-3 minutes will be about something special for the coming TT, which means that we have maybe 5 minutes for something meaningfully new.

But I think it's right to end on a positive note, because the decline of ORKO meta is going to make the game a lot more interesting, and that's what I want to emphasize.

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Apologies that it's less organized and the quality of the writing is a bit lower than I would normally go for. I wanted to get it out a few hours before Feh channel.

Agree? Disagree? Your responses and questions are welcome!