Part 92: Supports and Pair-up Bonuses

Supports and Pair-Up Bonuses

Supports

When a character attacks with another character, either adjacent or paired-up, they gain bonuses to their hit rate, avoid, critical, and critical avoid. Most characters can gain Support points that lead up to a rank (C, B, A, and S in some cases) that increase the bonuses you receive.



Being merely next to/paired-up counts for 1 Support Rank. C=2, B=3, D=4, and S=5. You may notice the Rank bonus going all the way up to 12. Supports aren't just limited to one character, as I've shown multiple times in practice. Each adjacent character and pair-up partner are counted towards the final tally for bonuses, so you can surround a character with 3 A rank Supports for a bonus of 20 hit/avoid/critical/critical dodge!

Dual Strike

Dual Strikes occur when the lead unit attacks (hit or miss) and the adjacent/pair-up partner follows up with unscaled damage on its own. The small downside is that they won't activate damage abilities, but there's tons of other benefits that easily make up for it:

-The range of the weapons don't matter as long as the battle occurs. An Archer can trigger his partner's melee weapons and vice versa.

-A flier battling over the sky can still trigger their landlocked partner (The battlefield is the nearby ground).

-Dual Attacks trigger for every attack, so if there's a weapon that lets a character strike 4 times, there are 4 chances for a Dual Attack to occur.

-Dual Attacks can still trigger criticals

-Effective Weapons still apply, so teaming up with a character carrying an Armorslayer against Knights are a smart move.



This is why having a high Support with characters whenever possible is so important. Two characters at A rank can still trigger a Dual Attack half the time. Don't forget that a character isn't limited to one Support like in past Fire Emblem games. Lissa can have an A Support with every single character on her Support list in one game file, though she can only have one S (but that's for much later).

Dual Guard

Dual Guard completely negates all damage, but the formula for triggering it is much lower.



Having a high Support doesn't matter as much for this, but it's a perk.

Support Bonuses: THIS IS IMPORTANT

So a lot of people new to Awakening question why would one limit their party by half to pair-up? That's because pair-ups give stat bonuses depending on their class, own stats, and Support rank.

Let's look at our current party and see what raw bonuses they give:


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Support Bonuses tend to reflect what their class specializes in. Archers are accurate, Fighters are strong, Mages help Tomes, and Cavaliers bring their solid stats to their partners. I'm not sure I get the Lord bonuses but +3 Spd is never bad.

The bonuses are further increased when the character giving them are strong. Characters that have 10 or more in a stat (raw, not like 8 and Magic+2) also gives a stat bonus. The formula for that:

1 for each stat that is 10-19.
2 for each stat that is 20-29.
3 for each stat that is 30 or over.

So a Great Knight with 30's across the board in stats will give a total of 6 Str/3 Mag/3 Skl/3 Spd/3 Lck/6 Def/3 Res/1 Mov to any character. That's anywhere from 3-6 extra levels of stats, and in Fire Emblem, one strong character is superior to two good ones.

Support ranks also factor into the stats given. C/B increase the class bonuses by 1. A/S increase them by 2. So Frederick with an A-rank with Chrom will give a total of:

8 Str/3 Mag/3 Skl/3 Spd/3 Lck/8 Def/3 Res/1 Mov

With a 50+ percent chance of a Dual Attack and a decent percentage of blocking all damage (The +8 Def bonus counts towards the formula).

It doesn't hurt the Support Conversations are pretty good, and there's about 400 give or take (not including both gender Avatars). I'll start listing class bonuses in the extras from this point.