Njalmer

Mage Sylvain is absolutely nuts from my experience, the mage class has amazing reach, spread and mobility which is already excellent synergy-wise but when you take their crazy set-up potential combined with their class action in the mix he can charge his hit count super quickly against bundled targets, literally achieving almost 1k hits in a couple seconds and on top of that he also learns Bolganone which I have found to be arguably the best spell in the Demo. But what happens when he gets fired up is nuts, we're talking aoe finishers that hit for like 1k points of damage over a wide area, bosses simply get shredded to pieces within instants. Ferdinand is also fun as a mage, essentially any character with a personal skill that does stuff at high hit counts works well as a mage due to their class action, mobility, range and aoe. Mage Dedue has also proven be really good, he learns Bolganone which is already great and he gets to charge his attacks, I have also learned that the Mage's Ploy skill appears to modify his moveset slightly when combined with his charge. His Smash 3 which produces an explosion of fire actually produced four SECONDARY explosions of the same type when I had that skill equipped. Priest is also really nice because he learns two very neat things, he gets Essence of Light and Fortify! Essence of Light basically upgrades the entire priest moveset and all light-elemental spells and combat arts and it is otherwise only available to Mercedes, Mercedes does not get Fortify this early!

Personally, I'd really love some spell tomes for the purpose of filling up blank spots in the spell lists of most of the male characters, as many of them I intend to reclass into Mages for fun's sake. It'd greatly increase customizability and make characters like Atlas that bit better.

Gray: Mercenary or Mage Kliff: Mage (He's the only male who learns 6 spells, he's to good to pass up in this role for me) Tobin: Archer or Mage Faye: Cleric, since they look godly in this game. Atlas: Mage, his updated growth rates look pretty passable. Also, High HP and High Strength makes him a pretty good Rescue-bot.

I'm definitely making Saber and Atlas into Mages, since their spell selection is really interesting and opens up a lot of tactical options. There's plenty of damage-dealers around, but limited support units. Also, there's something to be said for promoting the burliest and most muscular characters into spellcasters. In Atlas' case, the decision is even easier on my part since Rescue has such a huge range and scales pretty well with strength. His spells will hit enemies hard, his healing spells will be powerful and Rescue is one of those spells which can trivialise difficult maps if sufficiently abused (which given how it has a HP cost as opposed to being a breakable staff, is made a lot easier due to how bulky Atlas is.)