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Theoretically March Ring does work with Thyrsus, you just have to equipment juggle. Kind of tedious admittedly. Thyrsus is perfectly useable on non-crest mages. All it does it hurt you, it can’t kill. And late-game mages aren’t surviving poo poo with physical attackers anyways. So for Dorothea, it gives her a free if delayed activation of Defiant Mag. Hanneman is my favoured character for replacing an underperformer. Mages need very little stat to contribute to 2 shots on a unit, and Hanneman has the best balanced Reason spell book. And as said, mages don’t double anyways on Maddening.
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Oct 12, 2021 20:47
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 07:32 |
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Bernie is plagued by the same problems the 3 archers all have. Their stats just suck. They have the worst bases with the lowest strength, worst defenses, and mediocre speed out of all your starting physical characters. So on Maddening, they don’t do damage, tank, or do utility. They’re not even good to poach because enemy Archer growths are bad, so they don’t get a boost at that point like the other kids do. Not helping the Archer you start with is that Curved Shot, while amazing, is really bad to start with. It might take your Archer from doing 4 damage to 5, wooooo. Meanwhile, the Lance users are doing a Tempest Lance for generally half-shorting enemies at worst due to Tempest Lance being the best. The axe users are using Smash to shore up their accuracy and hit reasonably hard, and the Sword characters are generally doing alright due to having the lightest weapons and therefore reasonably capable of doubling. Bernadetta has the best chance to dig her way out of the Archer hole, and most of the time I found Persecution Complex hard to activate and just putting her up to doing maybe ok damage. She’s having issues leveling due to doing bad damage, may not even get her HP up, and getting her injured usually means unequipping her weapon to avoid being doubled and letting someone whack her, which is bad for momentum and just feels dumb.
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Oct 16, 2021 23:40
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Weeble posted:In regard to Curved Shot, it's actually amazing. It's not about the miniscule damage it gives, it's about the +1 range and increased accuracy. You use it to reliably chip down an enemy into the range that you can oneshot them with another character and not have to eat a counter. Or to finish off an enemy that's just barely hanging on. I did say that Curved Shot is amazing in my statement. In fact, literally every physical unit I run has a Bow and Curved Shot, since it's just D rank bows. Sometimes you just need a super accurate 2 range attack, sometimes you can roll the dice to land the 3 range. Edelgard hilariously in my CF run became extremely handy with it with a Steel Bow (despite the Bow penalty). It absolutely does nothing to help the designated Archers at the beginning of the game. theshim posted:One of the biggest problems Bernie faces on Maddening is that it's extremely difficult to activate Persecution Complex safely early on, and without it, she's pretty dire without a bunch of good levels. The most dire part about your statement here is imagine the situation with the archers WITHOUT that skill. Edit: And yeah, Leonie is broken. She has no business having defense that high, with speed that high, and still has adequate strength on top of that. Keldulas fucked around with this message at 09:26 on Oct 17, 2021 |
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Oct 17, 2021 09:21
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It feels like in comparison to the other brawler’s they given him a better speed growth and nuked his speed base. Which makes him a melee character with mediocre defense constantly getting doubled. Which makes him less durable than Petra and the like. I don’t agree with the Archer thing, largely because if I want someone who does chip damage that can’t take a hit I’ll take a mage instead. It’s trivial to make a Mage do half a unit’s health in damage after the early game, so any two Mages will just kill a unit themselves. Plus they have utility in being able to heal, whether for actual need or chip exp. Or Warp or Meteor or whatever based on the Mage. They’re also more resilient to RNG screw due to caring about literally only Magic and their classes giving a Magic boost. Thyrsus existing means Archers don’t even have more range either, and the mages are more accurate at range.
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Oct 17, 2021 22:32
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Mages of Three Houses have the problem of being very stat-identical in practice. The only stat that matters for them is Magic, because none of them are geared to take a hit. With Maddening stat inflation, they're not even that reliable for magic tanking in the late-game due to the stats ramping up really hard there, including speed. Which means that they get doubled, and can't tank more than a singular mage if that. So it just comes down to spell-lists. Which makes Mage choice pretty samey. It's why Constance can compete with Lysithea despite a non-existent speed growth. If they never double anyways and you don't want them taking hits regardless, she matches Lysithea in the important stat of 60% magic growth. Mage accuracy is also nerfed due to it being skill + luck divided rather than just skill, which means they want to grab Archer Hit +20 or something to compensate anyways. I still maintain that Sylvain is the only possible magic-using tank. Reason avoid + 20 and the bulk growths of a tanky physical unit means that he can actually tank. Plus Magic being unaffected by terrain means you can throw him into a dense forest and laugh at all the physical units that try to kill him. His Magic is low, but serviceable and largely gets fixed by Warlock at 20 so that his magic power is 'behind, but still fine'. The number of maps where he just kind of stalled or soloed a side for me because there was a bush to use is kind of hilarious. It sucks he never gets Gremory, but whatever.
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Nov 1, 2021 18:40
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To be fair about Balthus' stomping Caspar/Raphael, they ARE kind of underpowered. It's a similar if not as bad problem to the Archer stat growth thing. It also doesn't help the brawlers that they're all built basically the same in terms of interests. Even the Archers are different, what with Ignatz going Assassin-ish, Ashe having Wyvern interests and Bernie going Lance. They just fail on the stat front, but their base designs are actually pretty varied. I never bought the DLC myself. In general, I have issues with Fire Emblem DLC because my primary interest is map design and challenge, and the DLC has a bad track record of either, being a great big swathe of 'make game easier'. Plus honestly, I didn't like how Hapi is literally 'Dark Mage Lindhardt, but better in every way'. Feels very tacky. Constance actually bothers me less despite being more powerful since her power is derived from being both 'actual Mage with Bolting' and 'another person with Rescue'. Plus it at least looks like they actually tried to balance her by giving her Lysithea-type growths and nuking her Dex/Spd on top of that. It didn't work because Magic is the only stat that matters due to no natural mage being able to take a hit or double 95% of enemies on Maddening. But the attempt was made. I never minded this map honestly. Yeah the spiral is a bit annoying to traverse, but it does actually play into tactics like thinning the wave of enemies by luring Archers to attack and pull them away. It's an early enough map that they actually put specific design thought into the map, while being late enough that you at least have the opportunity to get some tools to fight back. Ingrid has never worked for me. For some reason she always ends up speed-screwed, which is frankly a death knell. So she ends up being an adjutant that's stapled to Sylvain for the dodge and might boost. My Leonie's usually end up strength-screwed for some reason, and yet still ends up being useful due to being a reasonably useful wall of meat for when I need to block places. Petra is a goddess who will stomp on the mere enemies.
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Nov 9, 2021 09:05
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I'm vaguely interested in this on the basis of actually trying to use an Archer-type, at least.
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Nov 17, 2021 02:23
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And I guess you tend to think of Ignatz as an Assassin since he doesn't get mentioned?
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Nov 17, 2021 02:35
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That Ferdie is in line with my general experiences. On paper, he's honestly a pretty good unit, with a decent path into Wyvern Rider. But..... he just never really pans out that strongly?
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Nov 25, 2021 02:41
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A weird direction I’ve done with Felix is actually brawling. His crest works really well with the constant Brave weapons, he still has a punching strength, and Gauntlets being light means he can wear his family’s crest shield without much issue. The Crest shield does a decent bit to mitigate his innate squishiness and you can always unequip it if you want a bit more speed.
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Nov 26, 2021 20:01
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The point about Jeralt's Battalion is a good one, because for all intents and purposes, they're a battalion with enough power that they can allow one ground-based physical unit to coast and not actually level Authority. If you focus your training elsewhere, either other units can get more powerful more quickly, or you can focus-fire other skills on that unit to try to get an early -faire or other useful thing on them.
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Nov 26, 2021 20:59
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I'm not the poster who said it, but I do think Felix is well written. He's a trauma child from the Tragedy of Duscur. The Tragedy of Duscur is a big pivotal event that ends up being a primary motivator for a lot of the Blue Lions. The majority of them doubled down on the chivalry angle, where everyone who died had died with purpose, and they should respect the deaths. They essentially contextualize them as proud deaths, and something to aspire to. Enter Felix. He's hard mourning his brother, who died there. Everyone is saying that he should be proud of his brother dying a noble death, when he's still mourning the loss of his brother. Which means that everyone around him and his society is putting pressure on invalidating his feelings. He hard rejects chivalry at this point because of all this bullshit. His brother's fiancee and his best friend is full bore into the chivalry thing, taking inspiration of it. So not only is she another voice venerating his brother's death, he also has to worry about her also dying a pointless death. With all the crap going on, he focuses all his efforts on the sword because it's the only remaining thing in his life that has any logical sense to it. He's concerned about Dimitri, because he saw Dimitri's sanity kind of crack from the Tragedy of Duscur. Dimitri was his friend, who is turning into 'the boar prince', a rage-steeped man who's one step away from breaking entirely. Canonically, Dimitri can crush someone's skull in one hand due to the strength of crests. On the Blue Lion path, he's the only voice of dissent, and subsequently the only voice of reason when Dimitri dives off the deep end. He gets ignored once again due to the chivalry bullshit, and the chivalry bullshit kills his dad before Dimitri finally starts acting like a rational person again. Another 'proud' death. While he had complicated feelings about his dad, still losing more family is rough. Felix is interesting primarily because of being the sole sensible voice of the Blue Lions. Everyone else either doesn't engage with the central conflict with chivalry or outright idolizes it. He's Cassandra, where he sees the bullshit of chivalry kill or threaten to kill loved ones repeatedly, while being heard by no one. Therefore, he isolates and focuses on personal improvement, because it's the only logical thing left in his life. He's prickly because people ignored what he's saying for most of his life. Most of his supports are either him colliding with the bullshit of chivalry, or people colliding with the resulting hostile isolation. He's very internally consistent because of that. He also resonates somewhat with me personally, and I suspect with a lot of people who have overbearing people in their lives who ignore their opinions. Any of his happy endings are essentially in the cases where people manage to break through either of the two overriding central problems of his life. It's reflected in his solo ending, where he just abandons his previous life and makes his living on his sword, the only thing that makes sense. It's very melancholic. Ultimately, Felix is interesting for being a light that's constantly being shined into the ugly parts of the Kingdom, and how said ugly parts have been completely loving over everyone involved.
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Nov 28, 2021 09:23
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I still don't like Annette because Physic is such a good spell and she doesn't get it. At the same time, she does have one advantage in being incredibly plug-and-play, even more so than normal mages. Since her spells are all universally really accurate, she doesn't really need HIt+20, so she's just very low effort to get going. Being someone who likes to do the choir singing means her Faith grows reasonably fast too. And using Faith to be recruited means that the MC can likely direct recruit her too if you sign choir regularly instead of waiting for the RNG of B-rank random week recruitment, and instead recruit her directly when you hit B. So she takes basically no resources and effort and can always contribute something. Which is good if you are spending your attention on making some really nice project characters. Edit: I'd still rather use Lindhardt for the absolute zero effort character though, despite the lack of Gremory. Keldulas fucked around with this message at 23:02 on Nov 30, 2021 |
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Nov 30, 2021 22:59
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That's why despite being the worst mage, Annette is still functional. None of the mages are fully non-functional in this game. I personally don't understand why people list Recover as a positive point, considering that if they have Recover they certainly don't have Physic. I also don't really take the point about nostanking on the basis that no mage can do that. Nosferatu is generally a wasted spell, all things considered. Seems like it's more just a nod to Valencia as implemented than anything else.
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Dec 1, 2021 00:39
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ApplesandOranges posted:Annette plays out a lot better in practice than on paper, in my experience. The Wind line really helps to offset her speed growth and allow her to double in cases where Mercedes would fail, and her Faith line is solid offensively if you need an extra punch on monsters. She's hardly the best mage out there, but I think given her gender and spell/rally list she's a good option to round out a team that already has two of Constance/Dorothea/Lysithea. I’m curious as to what cases those would be because it’s literally a difference of one weight between Fire and Wind. Plus Maddening doesn’t really have most mages double anyways.
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Dec 1, 2021 22:27
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I like Marianne for being the healer that gets away from the mold of the typical mage setup due to Soulblade. She also contributes to the weird trend of Golden Deer mages being the best at alpha strikes and the most likely to one shot an enemy unit. Lysithea is still better at it, mind you, but still. I like having 3 swords in her hands. Training Sword+ for the bargain bin cheap Soulblade, Steel Sword+ for the medium option, or Devil Sword for pure power. Having 18 might base before adding on Magic and 30% of res means she hits hard with that, and I have used her to obliterate a target. Though she does need Hit +20 to compensate for the Devil Sword. Edit: Blutgang is oddly enough just sort of there. It does give her two targets for effective damage with Beast Fang to add to her repertoire of Alpha Strike, and that’s not nothing. But if she’s going to melee something she’s better off just using Soulblade anyways. Which means she can just use a regular sword anyways and not add to the material costs to repair a relic weapon. Keldulas fucked around with this message at 21:14 on Dec 2, 2021 |
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Dec 2, 2021 20:57
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Battalions also kind of exacerbate the problem. You basically can’t be a flying hybrid because the battalions will penalize magic. So you’re stuck on the ground. The battalion you get with Thyrsus admittedly does support hybriding but it does cut down your options. It doesn’t help that Lorenz is stuck at 4 movement for a significant chunk of the game if he wants access to his actual magic. Or that physical penalizes magic growth, and vice versa. Or Fiendish and Death Blow not working for the other. Or that the sharply curtailed skill slot system cuts down your ability to effectively use multiple weapon types. It’s bad enough that on my Mage Sylvains I don’t bother trying to use physicals despite his relic weapon and everything.
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Dec 12, 2021 21:43
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RevolverDivider posted:Lorenz is functional as a pure mage but he’s still one of your worst options. Him not doubling doesn’t really matter as none of your mages will double on Maddening and Ragnarok can still one shot some enemies even on Maddening but even on Deer once you have an alternative option there’s no need to deploy him I'm vaguely curious as to how magic blessed that Lorenz was because I don't generally have any non-Lysitheas one-shot units. His actual advantage as a mage is B rank Ragnarok and getting a 2nd A rank Black Magic spell. It's not much because Lysithea (again) does the 'mage with multiple massive nukes' thing better than he does. It's just really glaring since they're both from Golden Deer. To his credit, at least he's not a designated house archer, cause oof. My Lorenz was still usable at the endgame. My Ignatz was definitely not. And this was from my hard mode GD run when Maddening didn't exist yet. Speaking of another nominal cavalier that can be turned into a mage, I found that Sylvain as a Mage has a very good ability to double. 50% speed growth, decent strength and specializing in the Fire line which is the 2nd lightest line. It's also not hard to engineer him to get C+ Armor rank either (since I usually get him C+ Axes/Armor to get him Fortress Knight at 20 for that guarenteed 17 str/def for that juicy mage tank business). So that opens up Sagittae/Bolganone attacking at full speed and even opens up Ragnarok doubling on certain targets. Though that last isn't really practical because of 3 base uses, 6 at max. The direct comparison just kind of makes me laugh at how outclassed Lorenz is wherever you look at it.
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Dec 13, 2021 13:08
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In my experience Ignatz was contributing basically nothing with no damage and no durability. Then in future runs on Maddening I saw how much extra effort they were to train due to terrible bases and that their growths were all the same crappy baseline. That gave me a pretty lasting malfeasance for the house archers.
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Dec 13, 2021 18:31
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I don't really agree that Raphael falls into the category of 'train to make Reunion at Dawn' easier. He's part of the 3 group after all, and by the time those people arrive, the fight's largely won or lost by then and it's cleanup time. Plus since Lysithea is in that group (it's own annoyance) and is likely holding Thyrsus, she can solo that side due to all the inhibiting terrain enabling the first strike... which is all she needs. If anyone gets trained to make your life easier on Reunion at Dawn, I'd say it's Lorenz. Due to being mage-capable, he was helpful to me due to healing and just being able to blast someone. And adding another person that can heal that isn't the MC for the intial parts. Reunion at Dawn was when I learnt to truly hate Ignatz for being completely useless. Being part of the first 4 threw him into having to actually fight, and it becoming abundantly clear he can't do damage or take a hit, and was just burning Divine Pulse whenever I tried to make him part of my plans. And this was just on Hard too since it was my first run. Though now that I think about it, I'd probably do Mage Ignatz on my eventual GD Maddening. The worst comes to worst and he ends up disappointing again, he at least becomes someone that can Heal and Physic. Which... is actually helpful on that map due to the aforementioned lack of healing to start. Or maybe I go dumb and just turn him into my Dancer so I have a Dancer in the opening bit, I dunno.
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Dec 15, 2021 13:17
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Funny story about Lorenz’s primary use, I didn’t actually get that benefit on that first run. See, I misinterpreted the text on it and thought it had a chance to halve the damage the mage was firing out, as a balancing point. Because it seemed way too broken otherwise. Imagine my surprise when on the last GD map, I use it on a whim and go, ‘oh, this is incredibly busted’. Got to enjoy the Lysithea experience for that one map in GD at least….
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Dec 15, 2021 19:20
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Manuela's main problem isn't the growths, its the bases. Priest is a bad class to auto-level in, and she's in the category of 'get 17 strength or magic on promotion'. Which is really bad for physical since 17 strength is too low to actually do damage. It'd be serviceable for magic.... except for starting with no Reason and a weakness in it, so you won't actually get 17 magic at level 20. Remove any singular factor against her and she'd be perfectly workable, but it's the straw that broke the camel's back, as it were.
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Dec 17, 2021 01:37
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I’m at least partially convinced that Edelgard’s personal class is armor so that she doesn’t have too much movement as an enemy in the other paths and have to deal with less threat range with the combat art. You straight up cannot let her attack you without losing someone. The tooltip being wrong is obnoxious and led to a map restart on my Blue Lions run. Essentially I took the tooltip at face value and put a dodgy sword to pull her. She proceeded to miss as planned, then get another turn anyways and kill two mages, before killing herself on a counterattack on my wyvern and ending the map. That was fun and not rage worthy at all.
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Jan 5, 2022 20:40
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While I have issues with the game's writing as applied to the forking paths, the game's backstory and Act 1 is pretty solid overall, providing a good backdrop for why people are doing what they're doing. I also appreciate that the blatant exposition is largely confined to the history books and what not. So it's both optional to read and not in your face. It also lines up nicely with the idea that random people aren't going to strictly know what's happening with all this political movement without spending some effort to figure it out.
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Feb 21, 2022 05:38
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 07:32 |
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It’s good to see a complete set of runs for each of the paths now publicly available. Personally the monastery gets tedious to me, so despite attempts I couldn’t finish CF myself.
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Mar 20, 2022 19:01
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