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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/maglag40k on 2024-01-30 01:44:26.
This place has seen several Fire Emblem Heroes stories told, so I decided to talk about one that doesn't seem to have been discussed yet.
What is Fire Emblem (Heroes)?
Fire Emblem Heroes (FEH) is a gacha game based on the titular Fire Emblem franchise from Nintendo. Gameplay is turn-based tactics where you control a team of Heroes from the Fire Emblem games (plus some OCs). Although Fire Emblem is usually a relatively niche franchise in the Nintendo consoles, the mobile version has proven quite popular and has been going for 7 years now. May or may not have a story besides an excuse to have your favorite hero in a swimsuit that may or may not count as heavy armor.
Tiers are Non-Negotiable
Now humans being humans, players quickly started discussing which units were stronger and more worth investing in FEH, in particular for PvP modes, and thus creating tier lists. One of the most popular ones became the gamepress version, offering a nice visual presentation, detailed analysis mixed with humor, useful stat details and build suggestions. Now although people agreed it wasn't perfect, it was generally accepted it gave a nice overview of which units were stronger and which were weaker, with tier 1 units in particular being all big threats that could easily sweep enemy teams on their own and were popular picks in PvP. You may also notice that the titular Laslow is sitting at said tier 1.
Powercreep Problem
Remember how FEH has been going for 7 years? Well a problem with that is in order to sell new units, each new batch of heroes is stronger than the last. Actually every year units just get more base stats. But not only that, they get better weapons and skills. There was already talk about Fallen Edelgard being drastically better than everything that came before, but let's just say powercreep has running more and more rampart. One unit will arrive to be the very best at their job only to be rendered completely obsolete in a matter of months.
Although plenty could be said about the powercreep issues in FEH, this post is primarly about the gamepress tier list. And thing is the tier list was simply becoming more and more "new unit beats all old units". Now technically FEH allows you to inherit the new uber skills of the latest units to old ones, but since the new units have better personal weapons (which cannot be inherited) plus just bigger raw stats, the new unit still ended up being strictly better. Thus old units inevitably just fell down the tiers, becoming less and less relevant over time. But there was an exception to the rule, a final hope for old units to compete with new ones and climb back to the upper tiers.
Refinement Revolution
Introduced in version 2.0, Refinement is a mechanic that allows you to upgrade weapons, and comes in two main versions. First for most "generic" weapons that can be inherited by any hero and just grants some extra stats. But then some old Heroes are picked every month so they can get a special custom upgrade to their personal weapons (plus a personal weapon if they didn't have one yet). Those custom upgrades can be significantly better than just a few extra stats, often with multiple abilities, and although they're very hit-or-miss in terms of efficiency, most being misses, sometimes when the stars aligned just right, an old hero got a really awesome weapon Refinement that could keep up with the current powercreep if they also inherited the latest top tier skills. The biggest example may be Brave Hector, who went from basically another spear armor to one of the top tier units in the game for quite a bit of time with a combination of a great Refine with the fancy new Save skills.
Thus every time it is announced that an old Hero is getting a new Refinement, there's quite a bit of hope and copium that it'll be the next Brave Hector that can climb back to Tier 1 (2 or 3 could also be satisfactory if you were always a bottom tier unit).
It's Laslow time!
Now Laslow had been one of those bottom tier units since the start of the game, just a 3*-4* with a generic weapon, when he finally got his Refine, where he got what's usually known in Fire Emblem as the "brave" effect, aka the unit makes double attacks, and both while initiating or countering (basic Brave weapons in FEH usually only doubled attacks when initiating) thus great for both offense and defense. And then gamepress jumped Laslow right into tier 1. But as you may notice from the comments, players were going WTF?
Main reason was that there were already quite a bit of other dual-phase brave weapon Heroes, often with better effects or some other sort of advantage (like Palla who was a flier and her weapon also had Canto 2 allowing her to fly out of most enemy's reach right away after attacking, amazing for hit-and-run, yet only tier 2). Newer heroes with better stats and other very nice perks, yet sharing the same tier or lower.
Gamepress main justification was that with enough support, including inheriting the latest rare super-skills like Godlike Reflexes and focusing on buffing his Speed (which was needed since Godlike Reflexes only works if you're faster than your opponent, and new speedy units are FAST), Laslow could keep up with the best Heroes. Thing is that yeah, if you throw enough support units, even bottom tier trash can perform well. But if you just used the newest hero, they would perform even better. And case in point FEH had just announced M!Shez as a new speedy sword Hero with a dual-phase Brave Weapon. M!Shez was virtually better at everything that Laslow could do. M!Shez just didn't make it into the tier list that time since he had just arrived to the game and gamepress usually takes some time for analysis before adding completely new heroes to their monthly tier list update. But there was simply no way that they could both be tier 1. Gamepress was accused of favoritism, in particular since one of their main members, Zeshado, was well known as a pretty big Laslow fan.
Gamepress under pressure
The controversy with Tier 1 Laslow was so big that Gamepress actually released a direct reply in just a few days, that seem to have been removed since then from their site, but here's a copy. Zeshado himself made a video about his side of the story, which alas seems have been set to private, although the thread discussing it it's still there. Anyway they basically said that they may've overrated Laslow a bit and that the tier list would get some massive revisions, including a new Tier 1***+***. And a couple of months later we finally got a preview of the new tiers, with Laslow dropped to Tier 3. And remember M!Shez? The Hero that was virtually better than Laslow at everything? Tier 2, yeah.
But that list never made it to the official position in gamepress.
Instead we got this. Long story short, gamepress threw their hands in air and decided that trying to maintain a tier list for FEH was just too much unpaid work (and I can't really blame them for that). No more tier lists, no more build suggestions, they've since then basically moved to just updating the stats of new units.
Aftermath
Laslowsweep was still a running joke one year later and can still get a chuckle in FEH discussions, in particular since he remained virtually non-existant in the actual meta before, during and after the controversy. Be it Aether Raids, Arena, Summoner Duels, etc, basic Laslow with his refine and Godlike Reflexes may as well have never existed. Never an unit had been placed in Tier 1 yet been so irrelevant to the meta.
Yet Laslow is still and forever tier 1 as far as Gamepress latest tier list linked at the start cares. Gamepress literally prefered to end everything there rather than actually drop Laslow down, despite promising an hotfix at least and having actually drafted a new list (that doesn't seem to be available at their site anymore). And that's the story or how one hero killed a tier list by being so bad.