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c/p from SF, specifically comparing Marcus to Lot.
Marcus's contributions in Ch 1 alone are hilarious. Reikken emphasized that earlygame Marcus makes a bigger impact than any other individual unit in any other chapter (or chapters, I suppose).
In Ch 1, the rest of your team is 2-3RKO'd, generally 2RKO'd. The only ones avoiding 2RKO are Bors if he doesn't get doubled (gets doubled by about half the axe enemies) and Alan against two weaker Fighters (they have either 17 or 18 Atk, once again about evenly distributed, so if two with 17 Atk hit him Alan can survive with 1 Hp), and 6 of them rush you at the start, including an Archer, so in reality it's almost never safe to expose anyone to more than 1 Fighter at a time. And you're 3-4RKOing in return (generally 4RKOing, only Alan has a consistent 3RKO). Without Marcus your performance, or even the survival of your units at all (if you get unlucky with dodging/hitting, you may be forced to sac someone), is partially luck-based, and even assuming that things mostly go in your favor, you have to slow down massively in order to advance without risking your units' lives.
Without Marcus you have to wall off the initial rush of enemies at the chokepoint above your starting position and just camp there, not moving forward at all for multiple turns, to avoid any casualties while you slowly wear down the enemies. You can't really do anything else except turtle, as otherwise you risk the Archer + 2 Fighters ganging up on someone for a high chance of death, which slows you down in the rest of the chapter (or longer than that if it's Alan/Lance that bites it). Considering that your units mostly 4RKO and you can only safely counter/attack with 1-2 of them at a time, this takes quite a while. Assuming a 4RKO with two units acting per player/enemy phase, it takes you 5 turns just to take care of the 5 axemen, and then another one for the Archer.
This is about twice as long as it takes to get past this with Marcus in the picture, who reduces that 4RKO to a OHKO for 2-3 enemies per turn. With Marcus countering two enemies and attacking one per turn, you take out the initial rush in literally half the time or less. The rest of the chapter proceeds similarly; you don't have the enemies actively rushing you anymore, so you don't have to turtle as much w/o Marcus, but you also have to waste turns using Vulneraries to heal. Whereas with Marcus in the picture, no one needs to heal at all. Even with single-digit Hp, your swordies can safely off a couple enemies lured in by Marcus with minimal risk.
Then the boss takes exponentially longer to kill without Marcus. Assuming Alan proc'd Str, he does 5 damage per counter, and then Wolt does 1 damage and Javelin Bors does 3 (with atrocious hit), while the boss regens 3 Hp per turn. He heals faster than you can hurt him unless Alan keeps dodging and remains able to counter, and if Alan gets hit he has to use a Vulnerary twice while the boss sits and regens, so you're set back a turn or two for every time that happens (and if you get screwed badly enough and run out of Vulneraries, then you're just, well, screwed).
Playing this chapter normally, I got a turncount of 11. I then tried to play it with Marcus stuffed into the lower left corner. After a few resets, I managed to beat it without any deaths, for a turncount of 31. To show how absurd that is, allow me to quote Reikken from one of his debaets:
And btw, even a 1-turn improvement is still very substantial. Considering that it's one action by one unit in one chapter. Or even if it's just like 70% of a turn. It really adds up. To help put that in perspective, if you have just two 70%-of-a-turn things per chapter by just 7 of your like 10-12 units over the game's 30ish chapters, that's about 300 turns.
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I'll take a moment to say a bit more on that before moving on. Let's take just Thany, over ch 2-6. i.e. before Zealot joins. Just her saving 0.7 turns twice per chapter (This is being very conservative. It easily amounts to much more than this, especially considering that it's using Thany vs using no one at all for the first 4 and then Thany vs the likes of Bors and Wolt for ch 6), that amounts to 7 turns. Does Zealot save you 7 turns all by himself in ch 7? I think not. You can even spend a few turns retreating a bit from the wyverns and whatever else, while getting better positioning and thinning them enough to advance again, and still come out fewer than 7 turns under.
Obviously from a Thany vs Zealot debaet, but the principles still apply. Marcus here is shaving off 20 turns in one chapter. You might claim that 20 is too high or inflated or w/e, but if so, then I'm fairly sure it's not by much. He lets you move about twice as fast before reaching the boss, at least, and then speeds up your boss-killing by even greater factor than that. And that's Ch 1 alone.
Compare to Lot's stuff after Marcus is gone. First of all it's not 30 chapters for Lot; if he makes the team, then he's almost certainly among the worst on the team and unlikely to be taken into gaidens, which have reduced numbers of deployment slots (all gaidens except 20x have 8-10 unit slots). Next let's consider a team of 12 units.
Roy
Lance
Alan
Dieck
Rutger
Miledy
Percival
Clarine
Echidna
Lalum
Gonzales
Thany
Whoops, that's 12. Lot's not even on there. And there's still another combat unit ranked between him and Thany, and I wonder whether or not you would seriously use a team with only 1 staff user for the entire game (again, maybe we should argue Ellen/Saul up). Lot's looking at more like doing filler duty until Percival shows up or something. So I do indeed find it difficult to believe that Lot finds more significant contributions than Marcus over the course of the game.
And yes, I would argue a tier gap instead of the two spaces gap that currently exists between Lot and Marcus. Marcus deserves to be substantially higher than any unit that isn't getting used for the whole game on a good team, and I'd think him to be around the same level as the lower end units on said good team. To take another example, I wonder why Astohl is a tier higher than Marcus. Astohl is not particularly good at fighting (IIRC; maybe I'm wrong about this?), and any thief duties can be replaced by Chad, whereas to quote Reikken yet again, no substitutions of any kind can make up for what Marcus offers. I don't see how a team disallowed from using Marcus would have a lower turncount than a team disallowed from using Astohl.
It looks to me like the evidence that moved him out of high in the first place was extremely weak. I recall only someone mentioning that he does poorly in Ch 13 or something, which is ofcourse entirely beside the point of what he has to offer. That's like bashing Chad because his combat is bad against Ch 21 Wyverns.
c/p from SF, specifically comparing Marcus to Lot.
Marcus's contributions in Ch 1 alone are hilarious. Reikken emphasized that earlygame Marcus makes a bigger impact than any other individual unit in any other chapter (or chapters, I suppose).
In Ch 1, the rest of your team is 2-3RKO'd, generally 2RKO'd. The only ones avoiding 2RKO are Bors if he doesn't get doubled (gets doubled by about half the axe enemies) and Alan against two weaker Fighters (they have either 17 or 18 Atk, once again about evenly distributed, so if two with 17 Atk hit him Alan can survive with 1 Hp), and 6 of them rush you at the start, including an Archer, so in reality it's almost never safe to expose anyone to more than 1 Fighter at a time. And you're 3-4RKOing in return (generally 4RKOing, only Alan has a consistent 3RKO). Without Marcus your performance, or even the survival of your units at all (if you get unlucky with dodging/hitting, you may be forced to sac someone), is partially luck-based, and even assuming that things mostly go in your favor, you have to slow down massively in order to advance without risking your units' lives.
Without Marcus you have to wall off the initial rush of enemies at the chokepoint above your starting position and just camp there, not moving forward at all for multiple turns, to avoid any casualties while you slowly wear down the enemies. You can't really do anything else except turtle, as otherwise you risk the Archer + 2 Fighters ganging up on someone for a high chance of death, which slows you down in the rest of the chapter (or longer than that if it's Alan/Lance that bites it). Considering that your units mostly 4RKO and you can only safely counter/attack with 1-2 of them at a time, this takes quite a while. Assuming a 4RKO with two units acting per player/enemy phase, it takes you 5 turns just to take care of the 5 axemen, and then another one for the Archer.
This is about twice as long as it takes to get past this with Marcus in the picture, who reduces that 4RKO to a OHKO for 2-3 enemies per turn. With Marcus countering two enemies and attacking one per turn, you take out the initial rush in literally half the time or less. The rest of the chapter proceeds similarly; you don't have the enemies actively rushing you anymore, so you don't have to turtle as much w/o Marcus, but you also have to waste turns using Vulneraries to heal. Whereas with Marcus in the picture, no one needs to heal at all. Even with single-digit Hp, your swordies can safely off a couple enemies lured in by Marcus with minimal risk.
Then the boss takes exponentially longer to kill without Marcus. Assuming Alan proc'd Str, he does 5 damage per counter, and then Wolt does 1 damage and Javelin Bors does 3 (with atrocious hit), while the boss regens 3 Hp per turn. He heals faster than you can hurt him unless Alan keeps dodging and remains able to counter, and if Alan gets hit he has to use a Vulnerary twice while the boss sits and regens, so you're set back a turn or two for every time that happens (and if you get screwed badly enough and run out of Vulneraries, then you're just, well, screwed).
Playing this chapter normally, I got a turncount of 11. I then tried to play it with Marcus stuffed into the lower left corner. After a few resets, I managed to beat it without any deaths, for a turncount of 31. To show how absurd that is, allow me to quote Reikken from one of his debaets:
And btw, even a 1-turn improvement is still very substantial. Considering that it's one action by one unit in one chapter. Or even if it's just like 70% of a turn. It really adds up. To help put that in perspective, if you have just two 70%-of-a-turn things per chapter by just 7 of your like 10-12 units over the game's 30ish chapters, that's about 300 turns.
--
I'll take a moment to say a bit more on that before moving on. Let's take just Thany, over ch 2-6. i.e. before Zealot joins. Just her saving 0.7 turns twice per chapter (This is being very conservative. It easily amounts to much more than this, especially considering that it's using Thany vs using no one at all for the first 4 and then Thany vs the likes of Bors and Wolt for ch 6), that amounts to 7 turns. Does Zealot save you 7 turns all by himself in ch 7? I think not. You can even spend a few turns retreating a bit from the wyverns and whatever else, while getting better positioning and thinning them enough to advance again, and still come out fewer than 7 turns under.
Obviously from a Thany vs Zealot debaet, but the principles still apply. Marcus here is shaving off 20 turns in one chapter. You might claim that 20 is too high or inflated or w/e, but if so, then I'm fairly sure it's not by much. He lets you move about twice as fast before reaching the boss, at least, and then speeds up your boss-killing by even greater factor than that. And that's Ch 1 alone.
Compare to Lot's stuff after Marcus is gone. First of all it's not 30 chapters for Lot; if he makes the team, then he's almost certainly among the worst on the team and unlikely to be taken into gaidens, which have reduced numbers of deployment slots (all gaidens except 20x have 8-10 unit slots). Next let's consider a team of 12 units.
Roy
Lance
Alan
Dieck
Rutger
Miledy
Percival
Clarine
Echidna
Lalum
Gonzales
Thany
Whoops, that's 12. Lot's not even on there. And there's still another combat unit ranked between him and Thany, and I wonder whether or not you would seriously use a team with only 1 staff user for the entire game (again, maybe we should argue Ellen/Saul up). Lot's looking at more like doing filler duty until Percival shows up or something. So I do indeed find it difficult to believe that Lot finds more significant contributions than Marcus over the course of the game.
And yes, I would argue a tier gap instead of the two spaces gap that currently exists between Lot and Marcus. Marcus deserves to be substantially higher than any unit that isn't getting used for the whole game on a good team, and I'd think him to be around the same level as the lower end units on said good team. To take another example, I wonder why Astohl is a tier higher than Marcus. Astohl is not particularly good at fighting (IIRC; maybe I'm wrong about this?), and any thief duties can be replaced by Chad, whereas to quote Reikken yet again, no substitutions of any kind can make up for what Marcus offers. I don't see how a team disallowed from using Marcus would have a lower turncount than a team disallowed from using Astohl.
It looks to me like the evidence that moved him out of high in the first place was extremely weak. I recall only someone mentioning that he does poorly in Ch 13 or something, which is ofcourse entirely beside the point of what he has to offer. That's like bashing Chad because his combat is bad against Ch 21 Wyverns.
