Good morning gamers,
We're back for another review of which characters are statistically optimized (according to my own analytic model) for certain positions in Fantasy Fellowships. Last time, we looked at the Ringbearer and Companion slots, and this time we're looking at the Friends of the Ringbearer who will be traveling to Rohan and Minas Tirith (aka, the Merry and Pippin slots). The only requirements in Fantasy Fellowships is that the characters cost no more than 50pts, which as of the writing of this article, gives us fifty models to evaluate (most of whom we covered last time in the Companion slot . . . because, you know, Hobbit heroes are generally less than 50pts). We do have some new arrivals, however - and while the two positions we're going to look at today are often in the same scenarios together, there are a few scenarios near the end where they differ (the Ride of the Rohirrim scenario and the Atop the Walls/Denethor's Madness scenarios). Let's dig in and see who's the best!
Scoring Criteria
As I mentioned in a previous article, your Merry and Pippin characters participate in 11-12 of the 23 scenarios in Fantasy Fellowships - or put simply, in half of them. In the early scenarios, they'll be fighting Ringwraiths and Barrow-Wights (Terror-causing units), then they'll be braving the road to and through Moria (with F3 Wild Wargs and F2 Goblins), then pop out the other side to fight F4 Uruk-Hai near and in Rohan (Amon Hen and Ambush at Night) and F3 Mordor and Morannon Orcs (Atop the Walls or Ride of the Rohirrim and the End of All Things). Because most of these are the same scenarios the Ringbearer and Companion are in, a lot of our metrics are going to be the same - but the biggest change from a combat perspective is that you can get away with these guys being F4 instead of pushing them to be F5 (more on this throughout this article).
But there are some key differences for these characters that makes picking the "best" character different from your Companion. First and foremost, the hero you select for your Rohan friend doesn't need to be a particularly good fighter, since he'll be riding safely behind Eowyn (buffing the Dernhelm profile) during the only scenario where Pippin and possibly other Fellowship members are absent. Besides the Boromir character, this is probably your best choice for a "dump" character.
Second, the hero you select for your Gondor friend would benefit greatly from being able to help your wizard character be better. Since the two scenarios where your Gondor Friend will be separated from everyone else involve your wizard character (in one you lose if he dies; in the other the wizard only begins with 1M/1W/1F and no staff of power), it wouldn't hurt to be able to make your wizard character better (or be able to pull models out of his fights). There will even be F4 Citadel Guard who can't be wounded in one of his fights - so a little extra oomph wouldn't hurt.
Third, these guys are often add-ons to your Fellowship (either your Ringbearer and Companion or the full/wizardless Fellowship). As a result, we wanted to reward certain characters for "doing helpful things" with these slots - things like providing shooting, stat regeneration, and banner rerolls. While you CAN get these sorts of things on bigger heroes, getting contributions from smaller heroes is a nice bonus in Fantasy Fellowships. Not all boosts are created equal (some require you to have other Fellowship members with certain keywords or could change the way you/your opponent plays the game), so we're going to have a qualitative measure for how "good" these things are. This is the first time that we'll have a layer of subjectivity in our model, but I thought it was important to let some of the more nuanced benefits of these characters shine.
With this in mind, we have four categories to evaluate again - three will look familiar, but one is unique. Let's take a look . . .