In Your Opinion: Whats more Important Boons v Banes

I'm of the opinion that banes which really wreck the unit are rare. Usually it's if the unit has a pretty marginal stat to begin with, and often even in those cases the unit isn't completely dead. You might need to build differently with certain banes, but a super-unit will still be extremely strong.

There's not really any bane that can stop M.Grima from being a monster. Some IVs just die more easily than others. For example, -def I don't like for an enemy phase build except maybe warding breath + glimmer. Getting hit twice on 32 def and probably taking a special will very often get you killed. But if using bold fighter, you choose who you take those two hits from, and they're probably from different opponents so you're probably not getting hit with a special.

The marginal cases are stuff like -atk on Felicia, Caeda, or Eirika. Felicia will lose most of her offensive potential, but she can still completely obliterate most mages on a glacies activation. Caeda will have significant issues with her atk, but when flier buffs are as strong as they are and def ploy is available as a seal, she can still desperation moonbow her way through some armours. She'll have a much harder time without effective damage, though. Eirika can still get her atk into the 50s with the double-dipping tactics trick (have her receive the tactic directly and then receive it a second time through an ally using Sieglinde+eff), and if she does it with her other stats too then her defenses are in the 40s.

Now, if you don't know how to work with an awkward IV, then a bad bane can really throw for you a loop, yes. There's no denying that some IVs are a lot more straightforward or easy to work with than others.

Hey, that's actually not a bad idea at all. I don't really bother with the heart system since I normally know what units I need or like.

Same concept for me. Yellow on mine is Neutral, Hot Pink is perfect, light pink is not perfect but useable, Green is trash IVs.

"Purple Heart: garbage IV's" I'm sure you didn't intend it to be a purple heart in that way but that's just really funny to me

You don't think Odin -spd can make it with some kind of Henry-ish owl tome all-in glacies?

Olwen -spd would be very sour, but with spd+3 seal, receiving hone cavalry and, if you want to be extreme, darting blow, I think she's still in business. Her atk was always an issue; +24 on Blarblade was always an answer.

I think why so many people are saying bad boon with passable bane is ok while bad bane is no good with almost no exception has to do with loss aversion (psychology concept). The concept basically states that human nature suffers more from a loss than appreciating an equivalent gain. It's this attitude that causes people, for example, to decline a fair coin toss given 2:1 odds (i.e. win twice as much as you would have to lose on an unfavourable outcome). In FEH it's this twisted idea that they got the unit neutral and then lost 3 or 4 points in some stat, when in fact they never had those 3 or 4 stat points ever. I suspect it's that we tend to think "oh yay I got ___ unit" and immediately think they have all the maximal potential over which people hype the unit, and then the bane is disadvantageous and somehow the unit magically loses 100% of the matchups it previously won. It's a pathological, execrable obsession over empty imaginings and refusal to appreciate what we actually get for how much it can actually do.

Some of the things people do to "patch" the loss are so ridiculous they make me mad, like one time someone said "I had -atk +res so I gave her L&D1 and now she has +spd -def" and I think it was B.Ninian too. It's beyond ludicrous how desperate people are to avoid "bad" banes. You didn't change her IVs, you just wasted a L&D fodder to deceive yourself while throwing away an advantage on a unit that probably liked her extra tanking potential. "Good" banes aren't even necessarily that good - I have S.Linde +spd -def and I have to figure out how to avoid getting OHKO'd against distant counter or any bow or dagger before desperation activates because she has 47 bulk with a non-def weapon refine.

The stupidest part, I find, is: if you're so averse to bad banes, why don't you just give up on summoning 5* exclusives except for fodder and stick to the 3*/4* pool? You can't handle bad banes? Don't summon! You're going to get your share of them sooner or later. Do you eat super-spicy food if you can't take the heat? Do you jump in the deep end of the pool if you can't swim? Do you enter a fenced-off construction zone without safety equipment and either knowledge of what to look for or someone to guide you? Why then do you hunt for 5* units to use expecting everything to just fall into place, drop 50 orbs, get a pleasant IV?

And it doesn't help that the analysis on some of the character pages on this site is narrower than the mail slot on my door. "Delthea's physical bulk is horrible" well yes she'll die if you don't invest in it, but if you get her +def, you have...17 is it? and fury is 3 more; if you buff a blade tome enough -atk won't matter and she'll actually survive a counterattack to get her into desperation. Now you can actually bait some bows and daggers at the start of a battle - it wouldn't be any different from initiating on them yourself except you don't need to extend as much so your position is more compact and it's even easier to keep the blade tome buffed.

Plus I think there's a part of it that just comes from plain incompetence. Some units really will struggle a lot with a bad bane if you don't adjust the build, sometimes quite dramatically. -atk H.Henry just can't hit hard enough if he doesn't build correctly and/or have the right buffs.