Silly

Sharing this here. This is how base stats are calculated (found by testing multiple units): If the unit is promoted, use (Level+18) instead of (Level-1). You can find Personal Bases, Class Bases, and Personal Growth rates in plenty of places, including VincentASM's helpful spreadsheet. Notably, units do not benefit from class growths in the above formula, only their own personal growths. As a result, units with a high join level will have slightly lower than expected stats, unless their personal bases make up for this. (For example, Mauvier has really high personal bases, which means his base stats are good despite joining at such a high level). Also this game rounds unit stats instead of flooring them like 3H does.

Raging Storm fills a similar niche to brave weapons. It's a tool you bust out on player phase when you need to kill an otherwise too-strong enemy (or in the case of Raging Storm, possibly multiple enemies). Accuracy is lower than something like Iron weapons, but that's okay because there are both plenty of ways to patch accuracy and also because these weapons can deal with important enemies that Iron weapons cannot actually kill. These tools obviously have an important niche. Nobody is really arguing that brave weapons aren't good in this game, and Raging Storm can function basically identically (use it for the first attack and then kill on the second attack with a different weapon), but also has additional uses, such as killing two different enemies in the same turn or using it to smack the final boss five times in one turn.

I kind of actually think there is, to be honest. Mages are just nowhere near as good as the best physical units in terms of killing enemies in a quick and efficient manner. They're slower, have less movement, and are more vulnerable to attacks (and therefore cannot be positioned as flexibly) compared to a good frontliner. Your mage generally makes up for their worse combat with their extra utility, but there is only "so much" utility that you need. For example, one healer is really important, and maybe a second healer is nice to have, but is training a third or a fourth healer that much better than just having two? You can definitely field 4 mages if you want to and still beat the game completely fine, but I think it's far from "needed". In my opinion the upper limit for mages before they start hitting significant diminishing returns is like 2 or 3 (barring very specific strategies).

This is mostly a balance decision. Defense is a stat that "snowballs" on itself, in the sense that the more defense a unit has, the more valuable additional points of defense become. For a brief example, say we have a unit with 20 HP, and are being attacked by an enemy with 15 attack. This is what our bulk looks like at varying levels of defense: At low levels of defense, gaining additional points doesn't really change all that much. Sometimes it lets you survive one extra hit, but often times it doesn't. However, as player defenses increase relative to enemy attack power, you see that each additional point of defense translates to more and more actual bulk. In our example, a 12 defense unit gaining a single point of defense is the equivalent of it surviving THREE additional attacks, which is much more significant than 1 defense was on the lower end of the spectrum. For this reason, I can see it making sense for developers to make sure defense growths are not super high, and for them to be especially wary of giving units that already have very high base defenses high growths as well. Such a situation could lead to defense snowballing out of control. The other two most important stats, strength and speed, do not really suffer from this problem, and are therefore safer to boost growths in. Strength actually scales in reverse, it doesn't take very much extra strength to turn a 5HKO into a 4HKO, but turning a 2HKO into a OHKO takes a lot of extra strength. Speed is a very binary stat that doesn't really scale at all. Either you have enough speed to double/not get doubled, or you don't, and any additional points of speed outside of those two specific breakpoints are not very significant.

Note that Raging Storm has 70 base hit (there is basically zero reason to use Aymr outside of the combat art, because wasting even a single attack means you have one less use of Raging Storm before you need to repair). If we assume weapon prowess level 3 immediately post-timeskip, then you have 83 hit before stats are factored in. This is roughly the same as other powerful weapons that you would be using around this point. For example, look at brave weapons. With weapon prowess factored in... Thunderbrand has 77 hit. Unforged Brave Lance/Bow have 80 hit. Unforged Brave Sword has 82 hit. (I'm assume you would rather get decent use out of your brave weapons before forging them, because their repair material is so rare. Also, no combat arts because using a combat art with a brave weapon is big dumb.) Counting other weapons, with weapon prowess... Silver Bow has 85 hit. Failnaught and Areadbhar have 85 hit. Lance of Ruin is at 75 hit. A lot of other good Swords/Bows/Lances sit at roughly 90 hit. Note that you can boost these numbers with combat arts (for example Swift Strikes Lance of Ruin is 85 hit), but that could come at the cost of being able to double (and therefore ORKO) from most combat arts, as most combat arts don't boost might enough to compensate for not doubling. Also keep in mind that the Bows will suffer -30 hit per tile beyond the second on Maddening. The point is that accuracy on Raging Storm is not significantly lower than accuracy on other important weapons. More powerful weapons are generally less accurate, so if you don't need that Brave Bow to kill then you should use that Iron Bow instead because it's more reliable (70 vs 95 hit). But if you need that extra damage, feel free to pull out that Brave Lance, or Swift Strikes Lance of Ruin, or Raging Storm Aymr. You lose a bit of hit, but it's not so much that you're likely to miss. You are still probably very likely to hit (especially on 2RN, and even more so once Divine Pulse is factored in).

There is an integer overflow glitch present in Azure Moon Ch 22 on Maddening Mode. From what I can tell, in Three Houses, healing from forts works by setting a unit's HP equal to the following formula: This is pretty straightfoward, and produces the intended result in almost every use case. For example, if a unit has 18/20 HP and is standing on a heal tile that heals 30% of their HP per turn, then their HP after healing would be AfterHealingHP = MIN(18 + 20 * 0.3, 20) = MIN(24, 20) = 20. The problem with this implementation, though, is that HP in Three Houses is stored as an unsigned 8 bit integer, which means its maximum value is only 255. Any number greater than 255 overflows and wraps around to 0. On Maddening, Azure Moon Ch 22 Edelgard has 199 HP on her last HP bar, and is standing on a heal tile which heals her for 30% of her maximum HP per turn. If you chip her for a very small amount of damage, then when the game goes to heal her, you get the following result. AfterHealingHP = MIN(198 + 199 * 0.3, 199) = MIN(198 + 60, 199) = MIN(258, 199) = MIN(2, 199) = 2 You can test this yourself by putting Impregnable Wall on a unit and having them chip Edelgard's last HP bar for 1 damage. When the game goes to heal her, her HP bar should drop to a very small number.

Raging Storm is pretty important on CF route if you actually just do the objective for each map instead of "kill every last one of them". If you just rout all the maps then it's not that useful, but if you're mostly focused on boss kills and utilize it to grab multiple boss kills in a short time, then it's actually an invaluable tool. All the CF post-timeskip maps are Kill Boss maps, and Edelgard having Raging Storm means that she is the best choice for your primary combat unit (aka the one that is eating the majority of your stat boosters), since a strong Edelgard can kill multiple bosses in one turn, whereas another unit might only be able to kill one. For example, this is an example of Ch17 CF LTC, which makes very important use of Raging Storm to kill multiple bosses in one turn. The footage is of HM, because there isn't any good recordings of MM LTC, but the strategy for MM is fairly similar.

I don't understand the draw of the bad units on a route being slightly better or worse than other bad units. Ideally all of them are being replaced or relegated to a support role anyways. It doesn't matter whether a unit is the worst or the second worst in the game when regardless of what happens I am probably just going to use them for a few chapters and then stick them on the bench. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- BE route has Edelgard, Petra, and Ferdinand as attractive long-term units. Everyone else is either more of a support unit (or mage) or benchworthy. GD route has Claude, Hilda, and Leonie as good units. Both routes also have Sylvain for free, which puts you at 5 good combat units (including Byleth) already. Add in some support units (healers and someone to carry support gambits such as stride) and you don't even need to add that many cross recruits to round out your team.

CF final chapter has a lot of really poor terrain, and fair number problematic enemy Falcon Knights. The terrain can be mitigated by having a good number of flying units, but you will have to have some way of dealing with the Falcon Knights, unless you did a lot of setup and can one-turn the map. The boss itself is mostly a big HP sponge that you can chew through rather quickly with Raging Storm and Brave weapons. SS final chapter has a really annoying gimmick, in that the majority of enemies have Miracle. However, it is also the easiest map to "accidentally LTC", because the boss starts within 10 tiles of your entire army. It doesn't take much brainpower to realize "hey, I can just use stride and then the majority of my army can dogpile the boss on turn 1". The boss is a slightly stronger version of the CF route's boss. Mostly just a big HP sponge. BL final chapter has a lot of problematic enemies. There are a lot of mages with long range magic, as well as War Masters that have ridiculous stats. Another really annoying gimmick is that as soon as you enter the boss room, four mages with siege tomes will spawn. These are ambush spawns on Maddening, which is a very big problem. If you deal with all of these and get to the boss, then there shouldn't be much of an issue. Like the other bosses, the BL boss is mostly a big HP sponge that gets wrecked by Brave weapons. The GD final chapter doesn't really have any super horrible gimmicks besides the abundance of poor terrain. If you have a lot of fliers you should just be able to clear the map while doing typical flier shenanigans (kill an enemy on PP, canto to a location where you can bait 1-2 enemies on EP, repeat next turn). The boss itself is definitely the strongest statistically, and is therefore the most threatening to engage. However, the boss kind of just stands there waiting for you, so you can take your sweet time routing the map and then setting up a kill on him. Overall, the GD final chapter is probably the easiest because it is the most like a typical map, where you just go around killing stuff until you eventually get to and kill the boss. If you have a lot of fliers then the map gets easier. The SS final chapter can be annoying, but should also be very doable, especially if you can realistically kill the boss in 1 or 2 turns. CF and BL maps are the "hardest" maps, though both have ways of making the map a lot easier. CF endgame is significantly easier if you have a lot of fliers. If you have a lot of ground units then dealing with the Falcon Knights is a nightmare, since they have so much movement advantage over you. BL endgame is significantly easier if you have a strong EP unit with Retribution (either a dodgetank or Vantage/Wrath Dimitri), as that makes dealing with siege tomes infinitely easier. Having some way to reliably ORKO War Masters is also a big plus, as they are actually somewhat problematic if none of your units can ORKO.

I'd like to point out that growth rates don't matter for master classes. By the time you reclass into them you likely only have 10 more levels before the game is over. 15 if you take some extra time to rout maps. A 10% difference in growth on your master class is literally only 1 point of difference by the end of the game, and even less than that in the chapters before the endgame. Also, in terms of support, I do think the best magic class is Bishop if you have Physic/Fortify, and Gremory if you're Lysithea (or Manuela, but she has a little bit of trouble making it there due to her Reason weakness). If you want to do combat, then Dark Knight is the best choice by far, but your combat will probably end up worse than a generic Wyvern Lord.

Mages are mediocre combat units anyways. I think most of their value (compared to generic flier #6) comes from being able to use support magic, which Lorenz is not particularly good at. He's not a horrible unit, since everyone in 3H is at least a fairly good unit with investment. But I don't think he's very good relative to most of the cast either.

By difficult I mostly mean "difficult to complete in a reasonable timeframe". Playing slower definitely makes early maps a lot easier. But if you want to complete something like Ch 3 or Ch 5 (which is especially horrible) without taking a ton of turns then the maps are really annoying (Ch3 has really poor hitrates if you're playing fast due to the abundance of enemies in forests, whereas Ch5 is just a massive pain). On the other hand, later on in the game you have a bunch of tactics that can possibly be employed for increasing the speed and reliability of finishing maps. Currently I think that the first 5 chapters on Maddening are the most "difficult", the later post-timeskip chapters (and Ch13 on some routes) are probably next on the list. Earlier post-timeskip chapters next, and then the easiest chapters in Maddening are likely chapters 6-12. Without proper knowledge and preparation though, I can definitely see the second category (later post-timeskip and Ch13) being harder, since enemy stat benchmarks are pretty high and there is a lot of stuff that you need to deal with that you might not be fully equipped to handle easily.

I assume on any sort of tier list that you don't do auxiliary battles, because that's a bit too close to grinding.

I would say that BE has the worst starting roster. GD has Claude, Hilda, and Leonie with fairly good base stats. You have two units with Tempest Lance at base, as well as multiple ways of increasing damage output (Hilda personal, Leonie personal, Lorenz personal after Ch1). You also get access to Rally Strength and Rally Speed after Ch1, since Ignatz and Raphael learn their rallies at D rank. BE route has Edelgard and Petra with good bases. Ferdinand only has okay bases and is your only unit with Tempest Lance, but his stats are worse than both Leonie and Hilda. You also have no rallies or ways to get more damage out of your units outside of Bernadetta's personal.

It depends on what you value, I guess. An easier early game but harder late game is probably overall easier than vice versa if you know what to expect and are good at planning ahead, but it could be more difficult if you haven't planned well for the dramatic spike in endgame difficulty. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Also, speaking about BL specifically: BL has the easiest early game due Felix's base offenses and Dedue's base defense. However, the last few chapters are probably "harder" than other routes due to the high number of war masters and magic users (many who have siege tomes). It is also the route with the best support battalions. However, it has the lowest number of "good" flying battalions, which sort of hurts.

@VincentASM When you get around to adding the data for the new patch on the website, I just want to point out that the playable Death Knight class has a +4 Strength modifier instead of the +3 modifier that is listed on the website currently. All the other modifiers should be the same as what is currently listed on the website.

Jeritza can go Wyvern Rider -> Wyvern Lord with very minimal effort, given his base C+ Axe rank and his budding talent in flying. You can easily reclass him to Wyvern Rider before the end of Ch 14. After that, Mastermind helps him get to Wyvern Lord quickly. His stats are also pretty insane, and he is even strong enough to ORKO a significant number of the bosses on Maddening at base. For reference, if you immediately reclass him into Wyvern Rider after he joins, he has 31 Str and 29 Spd at base. He also has Darting Blow, which gives him another 6 AS, as well as B Authority at base, which lets him equip a strong battalion for even more strength. To illustrate just how insane these stats are, compare Jeritza to Seteth, a unit that we largely think is great. Seteth does get access to Swift Strikes after a while, which is a big plus, but he also only has bases of 27 Str and 19 Spd. Jeritza has TEN points of speed up on Seteth (16 with Darting Blow) along with more strength. Note thought that if you're doing some form of LTC, the CF route heavily revolves around Edelgard as your primary combat unit, since you need to feed her exp so that she can clear some of the later maps with Aymr. So Jeritza's relative contributions are probably less significant than he would seem, because even if he could have gotten a bosskill you likely want to try and feed that kill to Edelgard instead if possible. But he will still likely be your second or third best combat unit immediately upon joining, which is still helpful on certain maps. And if you're not doing full LTC, but are instead just playing quickly, then Jeritza will have more room to shine. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Anna is pretty mediocre. She's roughly similar to a unit like Bernadetta or Ashe. Her bases/growths are on the low side. If you leave her unrecruited for a while she does benefit a lot from enemy thief growths, but this also means she trains Sword + Bow, which probably disqualifies her from going Wyvern. She can still realistically make it to Bow Knight with a bit of effort though, even with a late recruit. Overall though, she's just not as good as the better combat units, so there isn't a hugely compelling reason to use her.

Enemy hit rates are higher on Maddening, since they have higher levels in weapon prowess and have more dexterity. They just aren't significantly higher, because going from prowess level 3 to level 5 only adds +3-7 hit, and each point of dex only adds +1 hit, so even with enemies gaining +5-10 dex across the board that is only +5-10 hit. This means that most enemies will sit somewhere around 120-140 hit in the endgame on Maddening, compared to 100-130 on Hard. It's an increase, but too low to make dodgetanking a bad strategy. You can still easily exceed 100 avoid with a dodgetank, which means you mostly can't be hit in either mode.

It's usually better to just train one weapon type. The majority of good classes only have one weaponfaire, and you likely only want to equip one prowess skill, so by splitting between two weapons you're losing hit and damage. There are a few exceptions. Ferdinand/Sylvain/Seteth/Leonie/Cyril should also spec into Lance/Bow even if it is not their primary weapon type because the combat art is very good. And your can slap a bow on someone as a backup ranged weapon. But other than that it is usually better to primarily just use a single weapon. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Healing Focus is not very good. Not because it isn't helpful but because Gauntlet training is not particularly desirable for most units. If you have it, you might as well throw it on if you don't have anything better, but the marginal benefit you gain is not worth the amount of effort to train a unit up to B. If you need to spend an action to heal you should use an actual healer so that your combat unit can attack. If for some reason you can't do this, you have concoctions/elixirs, which mimic the effect of a combat art, except you don't need to train Gauntlets to use them. Curved Shot is pretty useful on people who are training Bows. This isn't going to be literally everyone, but it's a fairly good skill for many of your units to pick up. Smite is a good positioning skill because you can teach it to someone who doesn't really fight and deploy them as a filler positioning unit (but in that case it's not really competing for much because damage combat arts are useless on a primarily utility unit). Reposition is pretty good but might not be learned by the time you can get into an intermediate class without grinding. Other positional skills are less good. Overall though, your fliers get so much movement that the relative value of positioning skills is actually not super high, outside of Smite (which is necessary for certain LTC strats). Some effective combat arts are situationally good. A lot of them are pretty garbage. Magic combat arts are also situationally good, but they can only really be utilized by units that have good magic growth. (They actually aren't that good at killing armors, because armors have massive HP pools and you can't double with a combat art, so they lose a big niche that magic normally occupies.) Stat lowering combat arts are not very useful past the first few chapters. The big issue with debuffs is that you need to first hit the enemy with your combat art, then have a second unit come and hit them to take advantage of the stat decrease. They can be helpful at killing Ch 2 Kostas, for example, who is very bulky and takes many hits to deal with. Something like -Spd or -Def means you need less actions to actually beat him. But later on any generic enemy should be dead if you attack them with two of your units, regardless of whether you debuffed them or not. Debuffing here doesn't do much, as you're spending the same amount of actions. For the most part, most characters will have less than three good combat arts to equip for most of the game, and later on they might have four or five combat arts that you will need to decide between. Many combat arts are situational though, so you can freely switch them in when they're relevant and take them out afterwards.

The big issue that I have with tiering combat arts is that for the most part you're just going to use what you get. There's not much point in arguing over whether Tempest Lance or Knightkneeler is better when for the most part you're just going to have both equipped, because very few characters actually learn more than three different lance combat arts. If your character is primarily training in lances you might as well just equip all the lance combat arts.

I only do paralogues and quest related battles. Otherwise I explore.

Ambush spawns are definitely heavily mitigated by Divine Pulse. You can usually just rewind and put your guy out of range of the spawn. The only map with ambush reinforcements that I found particularly dumb was BL endgame, because the ambush spawns have siege tomes, and when you trigger them your entire army is probably in range.

It's possible with some grinding. And I would assume that many people (including myself) typically do play this way. But I feel like when talking about tier lists and rankings it is usually best to assume minimal or no grinding.

Assuming you're finishing maps relatively quickly and do minimal/no grinding, a somewhat realistic skill setup for a typical Bow Knight towards the end of the game would probably be: Bow Prowess Close Counter Death Blow/Hit +20 Weight -3 Move +1 This only requires you to grind one class mastery. Everything else you should just naturally pick up at some point while training weapon ranks, and with the exception of Move +1, everything comes relatively early in the game. If you took the time to grind a second intermediate class skill, that can replace something on the list (or be the filler skill that you use before you learn Move +1). For reference, I would assume a typical Wyvern/Falcon Knight to have something along the lines of the following skill set: Axe/Lance Prowess Death/Darting Blow Weight -3 Alert Stance Filler With the filler skill being whatever you happen to find most useful (there are a lot of different options depending on the situation). Also, in terms of which skills to tutor in, I think it's pretty commonly accepted that you should periodically dedicate some training to work towards grabbing C armor and B authority. These are two of the most useful "extra" weapon ranks you can train in, and don't take too much work to grab.

I'll point out that Shamir's poor speed growth does mean that she will fall off in the AS department unless you take measures to keep her up, but Shamir also has really bad speed growth for this game so she is maybe not the best representation for a typical bow unit. Take Leonie, for example, who is a relatively good candidate for the BK class. She averages 33-34 speed at level 40, and can gain +2 speed by dismounting (if necessary). Between stat boosters, cooking, and a potential Speed Ring, it's very realistic to hit speed thresholds with this unit to double everything besides the super fast enemy classes (you generally need 35-40 AS to double most generic enemies towards the end of the game). If we just assume something like 2-3 meals before every story mission (which should be what you're doing, barring one or two specific missions), then that already puts you at basically doubling things. A slightly slower unit like Ashe averages about 29-30 speed at level 40, which is farther from doubling on Maddening but still doable with a bit of help. (Though I personally think you should just bench Ashe and pick a better unit.) Subtracting AS due to weapon weight also shouldn't be as relevant as you make it seem because by the endgame you should have more than enough wexp to get Weight -3 on the relevant units if you're smart about optimizing. Also, I'm going to point out that competition for speed boosters is lower than it first seems, as long as you're mostly using good units/classes. Your dedicated support units (such as staff bots and dancers) do not care about AS at all. Speed boosters are usually wasted on mages because they tend to be slower than physical units across the board and tend to get involved in less combat on average, so salvaging their speed is likely not worth it. You good fliers, surprisingly, don't need much help in the speed department, because flying classes have ridiculous speed for some reason. Average Wyverns like Ferdinand/Hilda/Sylvain will hit 33-34 speed at level 40, which means that it's not very difficult to push them to the point where they are doubling (you usually just need to cook some speed meals and you're there). And if you have Darting Blow (easy pickup for female fliers), then that does it as well. This means that most of your speed boosters are probably going to be going to the units that can use them the most, which are your non-flying core combatants. This is typically your Bow users, or maybe a War Master or something. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Also, to people trying to say that training riding is a waste on Shamir, I'm also going to point out that BK Shamir actually takes less weapon exp to get into than for any student, because she starts with so much free wexp allocated to the right spots. Shamir is going to join with A Bows and C Lances at base, which means that literally the only thing she needs to certify for BK is a riding rank. At minimum she only needs C+ Riding to pass the certification, which only requires 460 wexp in a neutral skill. Compare this to someone "well suited" to being a BK like Leonie. Minimum certification ranks for her would be C Lance, B+ Bow, B Riding, which requires 1680 wexp, even if we generously assume that having a strength makes you gain wexp 50% faster (which is definitely not the case), this still means Leonie needs to gain 1120 wexp to Shamir's 460. Adding in a potential 5 months of tutoring for Leonie closes the gap, but Shamir is still winning, and if you cross recruit Leonie then the difference in wexp needed is vastly more apparent. Even if we redid the numbers assuming we wanted a 100% pass rate instead of the minimum required pass rate, Shamir requires 1220 wexp to get to BK, whereas Leonie requires 2480. Again, making the very generous assumption that Leonie's strengths means she gains wexp 50% more quickly, this still means she needs to gain 1650 wexp for BK certification, which is again still significantly more than Shamir. Not to mention that Shamir starts with base D authority, which is another 100 wexp head start. You wouldn't think that the above numbers would be the case, but having a base weapon rank of A is a huge deal, because if you can make use of it, it is so much free wexp. This also applies to Alois, by the way. Despite having no base flying rank and a flying weakness, his base A Axe rank means that it's actually pretty easy to get him into Wyvern Rider, and not super difficult to get to Wyvern Lord.