Skill Transfer Value Overview

Note: This guide is out of date. It is uncertain when we will be able to update this.

Many have sought our guidance for advice on what to do once their box has been filled with beloved Fire Emblem characters, and you need more space to keep summoning new heroes.  And we gave the same answer every time:

Expanding your barracks' size is always a great move!  

1 Orb to house five new characters is a very cheap price to pay considering half the time you get a Bartre for 5 orbs.  And then, we were sought-out once again, "I'm 500/500, What do I do now?!"  We sympathized with their plight and told them what they should do then:

Inheriting more skills is never a bad idea!  

Nothing is wrong with a character having multiple options and multiple builds to use for different team compositions and challenges.  And they did.  They skill inherited everything till they could skill inherit NO MORE.  And then they came a third time, heads hung low with remorse, "I have a full box.  I've expanded like you told me.  Pretty much everyone who I want to use knows everything they need to know.  The only thing I can do now is try to teach my Lucina how to use a Brave Lance, but she just won't pick up a spear.  What do I do now? I want to pull from this banner ASAP!"  Unbelievable, right?  Well, the last thing you can do besides merging spare units is to send some units home.  But how do you choose among 500 units who to send home?

In order to cater to your every need, we have gone to great lengths to come up with a rough approximation of which units are good to have around for future Skill Inheritance needs.  We hope this page, if anything, makes your time sending your beloved units home a little less unpleasant.  Sending a unit home will reward you with a number of feathers based on the unit’s rarity and number of times they are merged with a duplicate, but the paltry sum of feathers are rarely worth the unit's potential value as skill inheritance material.  So we attempted to create a methodology for weighing units' Skill Transfer Values and comparing them against their comrades.

Assuming the characters in question are not characters you wish to use on a team, the only criteria we use for deciding to keep or let go units is their value for Skill Inheritance, not how good the unit is themselves.

For this explanation, every unit is evaluated based on the following criteria:

1. The weapon they can attain as a 5-star. 
2. The support skill they can attain as a 3-star.
3. The special skills they can attain as a 3-star and as a 4-star.

4. The maximum level abilities they can attain as a 4-star (or 5-star if the unit can only be attained as a 5-star).  For example, Fortify Def 3 will not contribute to Cherche's ranking since she can only learn it as a 5-star, but Frederick gets a boost from Fortify Def 3 because he can learn it as a 4-star.  The only level 2 passives that contribute points to their characters are the following:

   • Life and Death 2
   • Live and Serve 2
   • Quick Riposte 2
   • Fortress Def 2

How are these units ranked?  They are placed into tiers of usefulness for Skill Inheritance.  And their placements are based on their STV (Skill Transfer Value).   The STV is the sum of total points they accumulate with their native abilities.  

If you are curious as to how this table was created, one of our top Emblians, amroamro, went to work creating a way to compute the STV for any given unit.

The higher a hero's STV value, the more valuable its skills are.