Gaming trends that irk you

[deuterio12]

Although those same high-end weapons are almost irreplaceable, thanks to being unpurchasable/too costly to buy in the one secret shop that actually sells them/there only being two repair staffs in the entire game, which at least for me often leads to Too Valuable to Use (insert your own TVTropes link here.) It also tends to lead to selection bias in your army, where the troops you use all the time and level up the most are the ones who are strong enough to just kill things with basic iron weapons, because you don't want to waste your Killer/Brave/S-class/artillery-tome weapon uses cutting through nameless enemy Soldiers.

True in a first playtrough on normal, but in second playthroughs and/or higher difficulties you can (or need) manage the fancy weapons properly.

(That said, most of the more recent Fire Emblems do allow some kind of grinding, whether it's repeatable world-map encounters or a side dungeon or just hanging out for ten extra turns in a map with an Arena, which allows you to grind money, XP, weapon skill XP, and healer XP healing up the dudes who are going through the Arena.)

Arenas have been around since the first game, but they're a gamble since sometimes they'll throw something that can actualy threaten even your best character or they land a lucky crit and suddenly you have to reset the whole level.

World-map repeatable encounters vary quite a bit. Like in Awakening depending in the difficulty the world-map repeatable encounters scale super fast so if you're playing lunatic you can only grind a few until they become unwinnable. And for Fates, Birtright allowed grinding and Conquest doesn't. Although those also removed limited use weapons besides staves, but then added a bunch of extra limitations for most medium/high-end weapons (like huge speed penalties and/or can't crit nor activate special abilities nor make double attacks) besides the personal uniques so that the best tactic was probably to just upgrade the basic weapons instead.

Making sure your healer cures every little scratch for the xp is standard Fire Emblem tactics though, I even saw the term "HEALER LEVEL!" being thrown around by some players since they basically level up in a different way than the rest of the characters (unless it's the first game, in which case healers didn't get xp for healing, instead they got xp for taking a hit and surviving, which was as risky as it sounds).

Now one xp grinding trick since the first game is good old "find a immobile boss lacking a range 2 weapon in a healing tile and slowly shoot the crap out of them while not allowing them to die", which is usually only doable early game since eventually every boss gets a range 2 weapon. Although Fire Emblems where cavalry can "rescue" an ally and move away allowed this tactic most of the game.