SnowFire

Characters have a few classes they'll ask for as suggestions. And yeah, I remember that line about staying away from 0 motivation, and I dunno what it was about either. I do think there's a mechanic that only appears very, very early game that seems to increase the chance of "bad" instruct results? If they start with less than 100 motivation, or if they don't have a C-rank support with Byleth yet, or something else abstruse? Beats me, I just know that once you get your motivation train rolling, the bad results become very rare. Re lenticular's list, enemy Sylvain can also appear as a Great Knight... although this isn't real wise as Great Knight is probably worse than Paladin for Sylvain, and also harder to qualify for. And yes, the Plus/Minus L/R will soft reset you.

Lvl. 40 Seadall: 48 HP, 21 Str, 8 Mag, 23 Dex, 32 Spd, 19 Def, 21 Res, 25 Lck, 11 Bld, 5 Move Main thing to note is that the durability stats aren't really THAT bad. Awakening and Fates balanced their dancers who could attack around being incredibly frail, but Seadall is just a bit below average. 32 Spd helps for avoiding doubles, as does having a Shielding Art on for +5 Defense (since Who Cares about Seadall's offense). -- For a variety of reasons, Seadall is exceptionally good In Engage, the clear MVP. I think others have already covered most of them, but I'll just repeat the part about "you can Dance Engaged allies" and also "Byleth exists." In a game where different units will be temporarily more powerful as the map proceeds, the power of a Dance command increases. Byleth already has the best ultimate in the game, and if you can somehow refresh Seadall with it via Canter shenanigans or just good positioning, it's even more OP, a synergy that doesn't usually exist for good and proper reason. Meanwhile, as noted above, he's not a tank but he's not "dies if someone looks angrily in his direction" like Olivia or Azura. My highest score elsewhere was 8/10, but I'm willing to offer the rare fractional score of 9.5/10 here. Benching him is one of the biggest ways to increase challenge (yes, I left him on the bench in my Hard playthrough to spice things up) and no character comes close in impact. That said, he doesn't quite hit 10/10, but mostly because 10/10 requires something ludicrous for me. Technically, his availability is a bit off being a 2nd-half joiner, and he won't really deal damage on enemy phase counterattacks? Weak complaints, though.

On fake-out lords: Multiple storylines are always cool. I had an old somewhat similar idea for one of my ways to ever take a fantasy story, although kinda in reverse. Basically the Marth-type lord in the first section of the game would have all the usual paladin-esque qualities": loyal, honest, believes in friends, fights for justice, etc. Could even be slightly OP for a "Lyn mode tutorial" type experience if desired. The game wouldn't cue the multiple paths, however, there'd be fake stuff like future upgrade trees that suggests this guy is gonna be your lead character the whole game. Anyway after you defeat the Big Bad of the first arc (your Gangrel-equivalent), the government of HappyGoodGuyLandia would send your team on some sort of easy fetch quest out in the wilderness, complete with another team of soldiers to support in case anything happens. I think you can see where this is going: actually, the king/prince/chancellor/whatever is justly worried that Our Hero's great popularity would make them a political threat & rival in the long term, so after you're already at the bottom of the mines or top of the tower or whatever with no escape, Our Hero is betrayed and killed in a sudden attack a la Sigurd (but in a less populated area). The remaining team fights their way out against the government assassins and then skedaddles. Anyway the chipper good-always-wins female archetype (usual disclaimer: this role doesn't have to be female, but it ends up this a lot of the time, especially in older media) would actually get some character development, if of the negative kind, about learning to never trust The Man and wanting to build a monument to Our Hero's ideals in a pile of corpses of those who betrayed the team. So yeah the surviving members of your team from part 1 would be villains (or at least very conflicted anti-heroes) in part 2, and all of those allies you built by doing nice deeds and helping people out in part 1 would be allied to or at least sympathetic to them for your part 2 team. Basically it'd end up sorta like how Fates tries to humanize the other 'team' by letting you play as them in another route, except this would be a single game where part 1 was really just an extended backstory for at least one of the villain sets. (And the government of HappyGoodGuyLandia could well end up a mutual antagonist shared by both the part 2 crew & the angsty part 1 survivors.) Can obviously go a lot of ways for who exactly the good guy team is in part 2 and what their thing is, really the idea is more "extended fake-out involving deceiving the player into thinking they're watching the start of Our Hero's quest rather than the sidekick's backstory before they became an extremist maybe-villain ." -- On the off-topic diversion of Leon "vs" Dorothea: I will say that for the very narrow use case of "how a game is perceived by extremely sheltered people and chuds," there's something to be said for canonically gay no-questions-asked characters. Which is not to say that bisexual people shouldn't be in fiction (a ridiculous idea), but rather that they are able to be perceived as hetero but "quirky" if you really want to put some blinders on or aren't literate in this area. I'm not sure how much of an issue this is in 2023 for the naive case (visibility is much better now than even 2 decades ago), and you shouldn't design your plots around the lowest 20% of media literacy types, but... it's something to be said for having a few Leon-esque characters.

For reference, Alcryst and Takumi do indeed have a conversation in FE Heroes "Forging Bonds", so you're not the only person who spotted the similarity there. A quick Google shows a video that I presume might be the conversations if you're curious. Anyway, this question is a bit off because I feel like 90% of the Emblem Bond Level conversations are boring and uninteresting, so why would I want more? Fix the interactions we have already first (although admittedly this is difficult when by definition, these interactions can't really say anything about the plot after the character / Emblem has joined). The best ones are just the humorous ones where characters are riffing on each other (e.g. Edelgard - Zelkov having a whine about Hubert moment, or most of Soren's conversations as he resolutely refuses to engage with nonsense), but it basically falls flat on anything "dramatic" or character development wise. Veyle & Lyon would be a serious conversation and therefore would probably suck. I'd rather have, say, Engage's goofier characters (Rosemary, Zelkov, etc.) going at it with appropriate comic pairs, given that those were the only kind of Bond rank conversations I found to have any quality.

20/20 Sleipnir Rider Hortensia: 35 HP, 10 Str, 22 Mag, 32 Dex, 34 Spd, 12 Def, 42 Res, 32 Lck, 6 Bld, 6 Move For all that you'd be bonkers to level Hortensia up all of one level in C15, this isn't old FEs where you could Master Seal on the battlefield to avoid "wasting" XP. And also, Sleipnir can't fly? ...probably? At the very least, he's certainly not a winged horse in Norse myth. Also, since she can't wield Bolganone anyway, the Build isn't actually a problem! That's enough to wield a forged Elfire just fine without speed loss. And yes, Hortensia is tied for game-best Resistance with High Priest Pandreo, for all that he has better HP. -- Looking back, I gave Citrinne a 6/10 (which was on the high side for the topic), and wonder if she isn't worth even more. I really don't think that Citrinne and Hortensia are all THAT different in overall worth, as often times the extra offensive punch from Citrinne is quite helpful in an unknown situation. Admittedly, if you really know your Engage and are doing LTCs and such, that probably favors Hortensia a tad... although it could be equally argued that if you know your stuff, you don't need the extra staff charges that World Tree will provide over time. Anyway, don't get me wrong. Hortensia is a fine unit. I'm somewhat less sold on the utility of flying for a support than for Ivy, though, if Hortensia is going to stay safely on the backlines rather than flying over mountain passes. Mystical has some nice utility (especially with certain emblems like Corrin & Byleth) that Flying type lacks, like the terrain-evade ignoring, so you probably don't want to run your only mages as Ivy & Hortensia. I'd also point out that if you give Hortensia Micaiah, you're giving up on Micaiah's "give a non-staffer staves" utility, which is a not insignificant loss (especially if running a Mage Knight). I guess to be consistent, I'll give Hortensia a 6/10, although I could see being argued up to 7 (but also probably wanting to upgrade Citrinne at the same time if so). She's good, but you CAN replicate some of her functionality with other units (you could make Divine Pulse Celine use attack staves too, it's fine, and spend a tad more money on staves), which makes it hard to get TOO high up there.

I'm going to presume you mean "textual criticism" here rather than "critical theory": Critical Theory is weirdo European Postmodernists who like to deny whatever is being talked about (but isn't really related to the Bible), Textual Criticism is something that is uncontroversially applied to lots of domains and only gets side-eye when applied to religious ones. And while this is getting a bit off-topic, it's not a disaster, or at the very worst, it's merely exposing a disaster that was already there. Like, if you're arguing with someone who is assuming into evidence facts from a piece of fanfiction, even a popular piece of fanfiction, it's totally valid to point out that this stuff wasn't actually in the game. Or even an official spinoff book, but maybe one written by just a subset of the team - the Ultimania guides for Square's old stuff were infamous for coming up with weird stuff that wasn't in the game and thus was of dubious "canonicity." Anyway, it's nothing new. Nobody less than Martin Luther kicked the deuterocanonical books into a separate "Apocrypha" section back when they were considered canon. And for the Catholic & Orthodox, there were several Church Councils arguing over which books are canon all the way from the 2nd into the 10th century, and coming up with different results. And as for textual variations, well, they exist. The Hebrew version of Jeremiah is a full 11% longer than than the Greek version, so you have to pick one to use - did the Hebrew version "Expand" over time with new authors (likely), or was the Greek version an abridged version (less likely)? Regardless of which way you think, people disagree. (I guess the Fire Emblem equivalent will be if World War 3 ruins our records and future gaming historians have to puzzle out whether a FE ROMhack that survived was ever an IntSys-blessed version or not.) Yeah, but the context can be pretty darn important sometimes, so at least *some* time spent considering what Shakespeare knew and how Elizabethan England worked is pretty valid. Like, for one classic Biblical interpretation example that reaches common people, take the very famous Parable of the Good Samaritan. It's cool that it's famous, but it's also changed the meaning of "Samaritan" to a person who does good deeds unprovoked. If you're researching the parable, it's important to get back in the mindset of the time, where Levites are good and Samaritans are icky. If you don't have that context, there's an alternate, worse interpretation where it's just saying awesome good Samaritans are cool, icky Jews are bad, an interpretation that has been unironically and directly propounded in the past. When really it should be more like "The Tale of the Good [Insert the Vilest Ethnic Slur In Your Culture Here]" to get across the idea of "actions matter not cultural status." As far as dismissing text for being added, what if it WAS added? This is hardly an unknown phenomenon, it happens, and it's very obvious with books of multiple lengths (I already mentioned Jeremiah above, but there's also the Greek additions to Daniel, or the two endings of Mark, and so on). Or for a whole-entity level addition, there's a famous fake play called "Vortigern" attributed to Shakespeare that was not really written in Shakespeare's time. It's fine to read it anyway, but you should know going in that The Bard didn't write it. And again, we literally have early Church Fathers arguing about precisely this in our records, accusing this work or that of being the work of heretics & forgers. Hell, it's directly in the New Testament: the letter 2 Thessalonians directly warns about people writing fake letters in Paul's name. (The darkly hilarious thing is that this might be referring to 1 Thessalonians, which really was written by Paul! Lots of scholars think that 2 Thessalonians itself was forged by somebody else... if it was, then it proves forgeries were going around, if it wasn't, then it shows Paul wrote that forgeries were going around.) Bringing it back to the safer topic of anime, at least people are under no illusions that there was a singular writer behind most Fire Emblem games. The Fates supports were written by different writers than the main plot writers, I believe, and the supports are almost never time-locked, which is why the supports sometimes "contradict" information from the main plot, or often dance around the main plot to talk about side issues. This is handy information to know when deciding how seriously to take some of the wilder stories in the supports as being an intended part of the Fates world, say.

20/5 Wolf Knight Merrin: 51 HP, 22 Str, 16 Mag, 34 Dex, 37 Spd, 20 Def, 24 Res, 24 Lck, 11 Bld, 6 Move -- Rather than Kagetsu, I think Chloé might be the better comparison... at least if left in Wolf Knight forever. Lightning fast and very mobile, but not particularly damaging, but also lacks Chloé's magical staff utility (although can at least be passable with a Levin Sword off the okay Magic score). Since lategame Chloé does fall off some, this is more 7/10 material than 8/10 material. Makes a theoretically interesting Lucina users too, if you want to have Chain Attack Poison Dagger strikes... for all that once you get rolling, you don't really need much Poison stacking to kill enemies, but it is cute if you have a low-damage team or something. However, if you want to have Merrin carry rather than simply hole-fill for some missions, there's nothing stopping you from making her a Warrior or Wyvern Knight for big Str increases. (Or even Griffin Knight for Chloé #2.) I do think she's a tad worse than Kagetsu, but downgrading her to 7/10 just feels contrarian for what is only a mildly worse stat build, so yeah. 8/10 works.

Oh, good catch. That 29.35 Dex is actually accurate to her "uncapped" growth from gaining 23 levels, but yeah, the class maximum limiter misfired there. Note that Warrior's Dex max is 30 and Wyvern Knight's is 43, so yeah, Panette is definitely leaving accuracy on the table if she never leaves Berserker.

20/5 Berserker Panette: 70 HP, 42 Str, 5 Mag, 29 Dex, 21 Spd, 19 Def, 10 Res, 16 Lck, 17 Bld, 5 Move That HP and Str is bananas, easily cast-best, although a lot of this is from leaving her in Berserker with its great Str growth and awful Spd growth. EDIT: Actually should be 23 Dex in Berserker, see below, but that's because of dopey class maximums - she'd get her full Dex in classes like Warrior or Wyvern. -- Panette gets a rare no rank from me. If you use her naively with no skill shenanigans, you have a unit that aims for one-shots via monstrous Str, crits, or both, but whose suspect speed and resistance requires some careful use. Luckily she can do some raw HP tanking, but still. However, the real attraction in Panette is the whole Vantage / 100 Crit Leif enemy phase killing spree that gets hyped, and I've never attempted this, but would really want to have to get a sense how reliable & useful it is. No rank. (Minimum 6 out of 10 for the 'out of the box' performance, at least. )

Hmm, I can't really agree here. I think Elusia was done so much more poorly than Plegia. Okay, both countries dragged into war in the past, and getting into war again now partially to avenge past slights. Sure. However, there's some problems. Gangrel is doing his thing because he genuinely wants revenge and to butcher Yllisians. He is directly following through on this plot point: you attacked us before, so we're attacking you. That's good, it shows story unity. However, Hyacinth is probably not! We have lines after C14 (and possibly after C11 as well? I forget) where Ivy basically says outright that Hyacinth was mind-controlled. She has a line to Hortensia along the lines of "Father was never the same after Sombron woke up", and in general the narrative tone is one of pity for Hyacinth as a victim of the bad guys schemes (see C17). So... Hyacinth isn't following up on the Brodia - Elusia border clashes we learn so little about. He's just serving Sombron. (I guess you could claim that Ivy is an unreliable narrator who is shading the truth to better recruit Hortensia, but that isn't an impression I think the writer meant to send.) Next up are the normal people. There aren't any. Okay, not quite, we have one: Lindon. Maaaaaybe Mauvier too if you squint. But we hear incredibly little about life for the common Elusian. Ivy & Hortensia's retainers don't join up to fight evil, they join because their boss said so (Rosado is ready to fight you before C16, not already defecting, until Hortensia intervenes). So the moral we get is that Elusians are either super-evil or super-dumb except their royalty who are awesome princesses & a mind controlled king. There's one throwaway line about how Elusia is Sombron's country now in C14 (like, seriously, the post-C14 conversation with Hortensia in Solm is the closest we get to understanding what happened on the ground in Elusia? What?). How did the average citizen react to news about King Dragon eating the previous king? Not that harshly since you're still fighting Elusian forces as late as C18, forces that don't care that Sombron apparently ate an entire town (C19). Compare this to Awakening - Mustafa in C10 gives a good sense that there is opposition to Gangrel at home and the narrative talks about Gangrel's support collapsing in C11. We also don't get a hand-wave where it turns out all leaders are wonderful and trustworthy unless mind-controlled (Walhart is also bad news), rather than the Engage / Sacred Stones idea of all attractive anime royalty being basically good people. Basically, Elusia is very very flat. I don't think the game really does care about the country - it's just there to have some humans to fight so it's not all Corrupted All Day. Lindon is good, but he can only carry so much alone. Plegia is much more interesting for "country whose religion accidentally worships the devil", although somewhat backstabbed by whatever the hell happens at the Dragon's Table in the third Act of Awakening (how many people were sacrificed, exactly? Just the hardcore worshippers or everyone?).

20/20 Picket Timerra: 50 HP, 23 Str, 12 Mag, 30 Dex, 31 Spd, 28 Def, 18 Res, 18 Lck, 9 Bld, 5 Move The suspect Build means that a Silver Lance is weighing her down by ~3 points of Speed or so, even at endgame. Best forge some good Steel earlier. -- Mm. Timerra's... fine... if you use her, but she could really have used some more Str. The Chloes of the world can make 23 Str work, but she has way higher Speed & mobility. Timerra's invested some in Magic, but unless you're giving up Picket for Griffin Knight or something, it's not really enough to make Flame Lance worth using. She is a good example of how Ike makes units with a decent Speed stat great tanks, at least! As others have noted, Sandstorm is interesting but unreliable. 30% proc rate at endgame is okay, and wielding a Killer Lance lets Gambler Timerra hope for some sort of good proc. And as Elf noted, Racket of Solm is quietly potent, especially on Ironman challenges. This is extra-true if you're running some low-Lck characters like Ivy, Boucheron, or Jade. Not so important if you just care about completing the map, but if you like the "honor" of saving Time Crystal charges, it's there as support. 5/10.

I will say this for Tormod: If we flip the question, and say "what is the optimal situation to use Tormod", then I agree that Maniac is where he shines the most. Normal / Hard are still owned a bit too much by bulky Cavaliers like Titania / Oscar / Kieran going bzzz and killing everything, so why make things harder on yourself? At least on Maniac, the tankier enemies means that the chip utility + mages still holding up on damage has some place. That said, this is more a "Tormod is pointless on Normal" comment. And to be clear, I used Tormod too when I did my Maniac playthrough (well... technically it's still underway, but I beat most of the game, and I stopped from boredom not difficulty), just his problems when he's underlevel shouldn't be undersold IMO. He really does need a forged Tome to do good damage then.

Since you said you're on Rhea route (which I presume = Black Eagles but not doing the Edelgard event to go to Silver Snow), Cyril is sadly still not recruitable until C12, where he will be tragically behind on skills and having leveled up with Commoner growths a bunch. Game could arguably use some sort of "lock me into Silver Snow / Crimson Flower" option once you've beaten Eagles once which would let you get Cyril at his normal time. In general, don't worry too much about compatibility for the Eagles. The Empire seems to have more descendants of the Children of the Goddess side of the war 1,000 years ago rather than the Ten Elites (since they followed Seiros rather than Nemesis), so they have a bunch of "Sacred Weapons" where the theme is generally increased HP regen (to contrast with the damaging special attacks from the Ten Elites?), but HP regen isn't generally very important in 3H. Linhardt is technically compatible with the Caduceus relic you get from doing Seteth & Flayn's paralogue, but increased regeneration isn't very helpful on a backline healer. Spear of Assal from the same paralogue also works well with Ferdinand (Crest of Cichol), and I guess the increased regen can be relevant because it'll keep Ferdinand topped off for his passive? Nothing that standing next to Dorothea wouldn't do, though. There's also Ochain Shield which has a Cichol compatibility, but that is insanely late game when there's very little left to play for (and requires recruiting Lysithea and doing Ferdinand + Lysithea's paralogue). Caspar and Dorothea don't have crests. Bernadetta has a crest but the last thing she wants is regen, given her passive rewards staying below 100% HP.

20/5 Great Knight Bunet: 61 HP, 25 Str, 7 Mag, 28 Dex, 17 Spd, 36 Def, 16 Res, 23 Lck, 14 Bld, 6 Move Averageish stats, trash Magic & Speed, below average Resistance, good Def / Build / HP. Yes. -- Well, somebody has to have a "bad" stat build I guess. Even just judged on HP, 61 HP isn't insane or anything, and the strength is notably worse than, say, Louis class-changed to Great Knight. Just use Louis instead if you want to stack Def, or Goldmary if you want an actual Speed stat. (And yeah, per lenticular, even this shoddy stat build is better than some true scrubs in the wider series.) I think Bunet is probably the weakest character on paper with the combination of "bad stats" and also "joining just as the competition for deployment slots significantly ramps up" with Ivy / Kagetsu / Zelkov / Fogado / Pandreo / Merrin all being very solid units. The kitchen thing is funny... has anyone figured out the rules of kitchen deployment? Is it just "random among alive units?" If so, then you could argue that deploying Bunet is actually a mild disadvantage on Classic, because you might screw up and get Bunet killed and deny yourself a very low percentage chance of drawing Bunet as cook + the meal being strong actually mattering. More for giggles there. There is one thing I'll give Bunet. If you deploy him and get him Favorite Food, then for the final 5 maps (+ any Paralogues) you do have the chance of multiple FF procs, which is kinda nice. Most notably, Byleth ult is the strongest in the game, so if you can find some excuse to give him Byleth that's nice - except that he doesn't have tons of synergy with any of the most hyped Byleth picks (Mystical for Thrysus, Covert for Failnaught + a good Instruct, Dragon for a good Instruct, trash Magic means he's not great at wielding Vajra-Mushti or Sword of the Creator). I guess class change him to a crappy Sniper in such a case? And you can of course use the same trick to recycle other Ults you want to spam, although Byleth's is really the most important one. This is pure theorycraft, it's theorycraft for just 5 maps, and it falls on its face if you fail to create a Packed Lunch, but it is SOMETHING that keeps him equivalent with Jade rather than worse than her, I guess, as it's something he can only really do. Of course, I gave Jade a 2/10, so this isn't that impressive.

The one thing I will say in Divine Pulse's favor - with how most people play Fire Emblem, aka the accept-no-casualties variety, DP helps make it make somewhat more sense that the Ashen Demon's crew always come across mysteriously unscathed and never seem to get hit by fatal critical hits despite being on the front lines of numerous life-and-death scrapes. Why is everyone so good at surviving? Unspecified time powers. Sure. (Except the people in the battalions, perhaps, but the game shows very little interest in humanizing those battalion durability numbers that go down. Gonna assume they just run off to the backlines when durability drops.) Anyway, I think Echoes did it the best (despite being the first try) - Alm explicitly doesn't know how to use the Turnwheel, or even that the Turnwheel is doing anything at all. It's just an in-setting way of expressing that fate, and save-reloads, are on Alm's side which helps tip the odds in his favor.

I think using Tormod is fun, but I'm a bit skeptical of him being listed as "the best" in Ironman. He's someone who is going to require special care and feeding for a very long time, and is fairly vulnerable to Ironman "whoops I guess that bow knight came out of the fog and shot my unit" deaths for the chapters after he joins. He's basically Soren with +1 Move once caught up, but in exchange for being massively underlevel for many chapters vs. Soren. And yes, you can fix this with bonus XP investment, but bonus XP isn't quite as plentiful on Maniac as on Hard, and that bonus XP could have gone toward making other units get snowballing even harder. I suppose that in fairness, you're already suggesting running Soren, so it'd really be vs. Rhys / Mist / Ilyana / Calill that the comparison would be with... I dunno. I am a fan of redundant staffers myself, but I feel like Tormod's drawback is pretty notable here.

20/5 High Priest Pandreo (usual internal level 15 disclaimer here): 48 HP, 8 Str, 29 Mag, 28 Dex, 29 Spd, 11 Def, 42 Res, 28 Lck, 11 Bld, 5 Move -- Pandreo is magical Kagetsu. Similar min-max'd stat line except with Magic and Resistance rather than Strength, and much worse Defense. You can stick him in whatever magical class you want and he'll be cool, with the combination of excellent Magic, Speed, and Build. He's a superb hole-filler - even if you don't seriously plan on using him long-term, he's often a great drop-in for any spare slots, and he'll still be competitive with later joining mages like Hortensia, Lindon, or Mauvier even when getting shorted XP. Works fine in any of the classically hyped magic classes. And hell, even High Priest is basically fine - it's not what you want at endgame because no Bolganone, but the growths of High Priest are a bit better than Sage and Spell Harmony is a trash passive, so no hurry in class-changing to Sage if that's where you'd like to go. Same with Griffin Knight, who cares about Clear the Way. (Mage Knight... yeah, maybe switch over sooner because Chaos Style rules, although that means going staff-less for awhile.) My one minor comment is that the Resistance is seriously godlike, but it's paired with better HP than Hortensia, so he also makes a fantastic bait unit for magical bosses & foes. Notably all the Hounds in C14 have magical weapons and base Pandreo can tank 'em all no problem, and this is still a useful niche later. Pandreo gets an 8/10.

20/20 Cupido Fogado: 50 HP, 21 Str, 15 Mag, 29 Dex, 35 Spd, 19 Def, 25 Res, 15 Lck, 11 Bld, 6 Move If using a Radiant Bow+3, lategame Fogado might still be weighed down by a speed point. Other weapons are no problem for his build, though. -- Yeah, what others said. High floor, but only a moderate ceiling. If you want high-mobility chip that also can blow up flyers, Fogado's there for you. Isn't even that Emblem or resource dependent - he'd like Sigurd if available for even MORE mobility, but it's all good. Also can quietly be an okay Celica user - lategame Celica isn't very good for the final 5 maps so isn't a highly contested Emblem, but she does offer both a Str and a Mag boost which Fogado can use both of, along with surprise Recover staff utility when Engaged, so if you're just looking to throw it in a place where she won't be wasted, Fogado is fine for taking her. Fogado reminds me of second-half Chloé. Similar to her, he has suspect mixed damage but great speed & mobility. However, bows hitting weakness on a lot of units helps cover for the bad attack stats, and his excellent speed ensures he'll at least be doubling often. Chloé does fall off a bit in the second half, but not THAT much. I gave Alcryst a 6, and Fogado is usually better, so... 7/10 it is.

Lvl. 40 Thief Zelkov: 51 HP, 25 Str, 6 Mag, 33 Dex, 31 Spd, 26 Def, 10 Res, 13 Lck, 11 Bld, 5 Move Magic / Resistance / Luck are just trash compared to Yunaka, but he's better at fighting otherwise. -- First off, if you dislike Thief, you can make Zelkov into Competent Physical Unit Number Whatever. Not as good as Kagetsu, but whatever, certainly comparable or a little better than class-changed Amber / Lapis / etc. Guarantees a certain baseline competence, although his passive suggests going for a dodgier-unit (alas, Marth has left the party and won't be coming back for awhile). That said, I think Thief may be getting a little TOO much heat. No, it doesn't really hold up long-term, but forged Daggers are strong, there's not a ton of classes that sport the Covert tag, and Covert synergizes well with Zelkov's passive. You can give him Corrin and ensure he's always chilling in Fog for enemy phase if need be (or have him near a Dragon with Corrin & a spare turn, of course), or you can just make sure he's always heading into the brush. Yeah, yeah, you can't always guarantee that Zelkov can find Cover for the Covert bonus AND do a relevant player-phase action, but oh well, it's still strong when it works and when the map cooperates. Really, Zelkov has one of the best passives in the game; most personal skills are pretty nerfed compared to 3H, but an evade boost is always appreciated. I'm torn between 6 and 7. Maybe I'll regret this (certainly going against the grain so far), but I'm gonna go with 7/10. You can leave Zelkov on the bench and that'll be cool, so he isn't required, but I feel like if you're just looking for another person to knock skulls, him having a really good personal skill puts him a step above the sea of 6s of the Diamants & Ambers of the world.

Level 20/5 Swordmaster stats (he's got an internal level of 15, so this is equivalent to 20/20 for non-prepromos): 51 HP, 26 Str, 8 Mag, 37 Dex, 38 Spd, 23 Def, 19 Res, 30 Lck, 11 Bld, 5 Move For all that leaving him in Swordmaster isn't generally considered wise, he'd rather trade some excess speed from SM for better Strength & bulk from Wyvern. -- Holy stats, Batman. Kagetsu is just randomly awesome at everything. For physical classes that don't care about magic offense, Kagetsu is basically guaranteed to be one of the best options, having good growths & good bases. He's Engage's Felix / Petra / Leonie equivalent. His insane accuracy even if he switches out of Swordmaster means he's a good choice for shenanigans with stuff like a Brave Axe, as well. Agree that Wyvern Sword / Axe is kind of his best default build - gives him a range 2 option in Hand Axes, buffs his Strength, buffs his mobility - but he'll make basically any class work. It really says something that one of his "downsides" is that he can get too tanky (if going Wyvern) or too dodgy (if staying SM / Hero) for enemies to bother attacking him on Maddening, because they see 0 damage or 0% Hit. In my Maddening playthrough, Kagetsu was having difficulty attracting the attention of the reinforcements in C14 because he was just too good. This is a "good problem to have." While Kagetsu is basically the best option for deploying a Wyvern / Hero / Warrior / Sniper / Paladin / SM / Berserker, he doesn't fundamentally change the game by enabling any "new" strategies that wouldn't work otherwise (aside from, perhaps, the "can still hit with really inaccurate weapons" bit mentioned above). Kind of like how Awakening Chrom is good but vanilla, while Awakening Nosferatu Sorcerers do something you simply couldn't do before. And it's not like the game is unbeatable without deploying Kagetsu; the "loss" from leaving him benched isn't THAT extreme. End result is an 8/10. He's great, just doesn't have that special brokenness required for a 9 or 10. -- As a slight DLC comment, if you've attained Emblem Hector or Emblem Camilla from DLC maps, you can switch Kagetsu over to an Axe/Sword Wyvern immediately for C12. Not that C12 is THAT hard, but it's kinda nice for C13 to have him a flyer there.

Belated reply: Blood pact bad, yep. To try to add something new to the "debate" since I think people have complained about this plenty... so there's a trope in stories, especially older stories, where people are kind of treated as "owned" by others. This has echoes of reality, of course - certainly parents really do "control" a lot of their kids' fates in their upbringing, especially in societies with a tradition of arranged marriages. Maybe the most famous are various stories where parents trade their first-born child to a witch or a fairy or a demon or the like for a favor. But it shows up elsewhere, too; in the book of Job (which is, at least, fairly clearly a story in-setting not pretending to be a historical event), God punishes Job by killing his kids. This is some real shit as far as "terrible things sometimes happen to good people, like all their kids dying", but it's still messed up that some third parties are harmed far worse in the service of a morality test of someone else (i.e. Job himself). Anyway, the Blood Pact plays into this on a grand scale: somehow kings themselves apparently "own" their subjects and can bargain them away, and the magic of the world confirms this. This is... horrifying. Like Divine Right of Kings in ALL CAPITALS. If Charles III made some Faustian deal, it's not just his own skin on the line, but apparently everyone in the British Commonwealth, because they're all his property he was magically empowered to offer? Yikes. Apparently all Elincia needed to do was go make a Blood Pact with Bastian, immediately break that, and then have Bastian target Ludveck with the backlash or something if she wanted to act wildly out of character. I also dislike that Pelleas apparently signed his Blood Pact "by mistake." To the extent that we want to invoke Faustian deals, they should be entered willingly. Someone accidentally signing their soul to the devil is far less compelling a plot point than someone intentionally doing so. As is, the idea of this being a "Pact" mostly isn't there, and it's closer to "unlucky victims of Lekain's magic." Which... maybe, but call it the Blood Curse or something then. Or if you do want a Blood Pact, make it be more individual, where willing individuals get superpowers in exchange for Lekain being able to yank the magical buff at any time probably causing most of them to die from accumulated wounds, and maybe some key Daien personnel accepted such a power-up for other reasons. (I get that there probably isn't time for this in C3 given this ends up close to the Disciples of Order in C4, but just a thought.)

For the original topic of advice for beating Hard mode: Let me just say I don't agree with a lot of the advice that's been given. It's over-prescriptive. You can beat Echoes just fine without any fanciness or specific forged weapons / class promotions, Archer is absolutely still a very relevant class with just an Iron Bow for things like sniping Cantors from range. The simplest advice for if you're having trouble is just to grind some. Echoes levels aren't that tightly scaled. You can head back to the Deliverance Hideout and grind away for some class promotions. Both waiting and promoting instantly are fine, it's no big deal. As long as you're equipping your main fighters with weapons, any weapons, you should be fine. Dark Mages & Cantors always hit like trucks, yes, but gaining levels will still give you raw HP to tank through their hits. (And if you get Tobin up to Dread Fighter - probably overkill for C3, but it's an option - he'll start halving magic damage.). Stats in Echoes are pretty potent - you'll just start winning battles easily if you get overstat'd. For the specific item brought up: Forging the Royal Sword is great. The (totally optional, postgame-balanced) Killer Bow is great too, sure, but giving it to Alm is more like something speedruns do - for your average player, giving it to a Villager!Archer or to Python is fine.

20/20 Ivy: 47 HP, 14 Str, 31 Mag, 22 Dex, 23 Spd, 23 Def, 29 Res, 8 Lck, 10 Bld, 6 Move Her end-game build is definitely bulkier than Citrinne, but Bolganone+2 will still weigh her down by 1 Spd point. -- Ivy's great for all of the reasons already said. Sage is a decent class and putting a Sage in the sky does cool, broken stuff. She does have weaknesses - the substandard Hit most notably + losing out on Mystical terrain ignoring - but that just means "give a good accuracy Engrave to Ivy." Problem mostly solved. She also runs into crit rates, but she also has first dibs on Goddess Icons if she's being run which aren't closely contested, so there's that. It does mean that she gets a bit worse in some sort of challenge playthrough that bans both Engraves and the Time Crystal, as the crits / misses are now harder to deal with, but that's not the base game and more a point of trivia. (And not even something to rule her out then - just means she might be doing more 3-range chipping with Elthunder while Flying, which is STILL a great niche to fill.) And yes, while Lyn is in high demand, Ivy does cool stuff with her if she gets it. She's also a good candidate for Speedtaker if you're not giving her Lyn, so that she'll gradually "fix" her suspect speed as the map continues on. And as already noted, her high Bld genuinely helps make her Speed more workable than it looks, compared to spindly-armed other mages. No need to go into more about why Ivy's good, but I will say that when you start trying to separate out the top-tier from the merely excellent tier, she is not the single most important character in the game in the sense of "who changes your strategy most if not deployed." You can, after all, get by with Citrinne on the ground doing something similar to what Ivy does, or various other Sage builds (Lindon, Sage Mauvier, Sage Anna, whatever), just giving up the flying. And further, nobody in Engage is getting a 10/10, which usually means some sort of design mistake happened here (Echoes Genny, various Radiant Dawn super-characters, etc.). So 8/10 feels right for her. She's a great unit who makes the game easier, but is not a game-changing one like 9s and 10s can be.

The final map is no joke, yeah. There are two rough suggestions here. Option A) Don't ever kill all 4 Dark Emblems. Just kill 3 of them. To my understanding, Sombron won't summon more until you kill all 4. Now, the bad news about doing this is that he won't lose his fell dragon type weakness immunity. But... if you have some high enough offense characters, you can make steady progress even with him reducing damage by 60% or so. Your characters who can't safely tangle with Sombron worry about killing the reinforcements, especially any Griffin Knights with healing staves. I believe Sombron will "call" his attack that forcibly disengages everyone and you'll be warned, so there's that at least - I think it's every 10 turns or so? I'd say that timing Micaiah's Great Sacrifice is probably the most important part - you can go nuts with smashing into Sombron if you know you'll be able to safely GS everyone back to health. Anyway, this will eventually work. Option B) This is what IS "wants" you to do, I think. Get ready for turns of massive offense when the barrier totally falls. Notably, Sombron has a Fell Dragon weakness then, and the 13th Emblem's Engage attack and Engage weapons hit fell dragon weakness. This means Alear + an A-rank partner can just go wild on Sombron. Basically, be ready (i.e. kill the 4th Dark Emblem early in the turn; if you can't, then wait until the next player phase), and then Alear + their partner goes nuts. If you've been sitting on a Byleth engage, this is the time to blow it, and now the Alear + partner get another turn. If you're deploying Seadall, throw in even more actions. High-offense characters can also do their thing (e.g. a Brave Lance Eirika user). You can actually one-round Sombron this way, but that's hard and requires special setups (e.g. Halberdiers quadding with a Brave Lance), but you don't need to - you just shoot off two life bars upon killing the 4th Dark Emblem, and 2 more upon killing the 8th Dark Emblem. If you do this, the healers aren't really relevant, because you're never really leaving Sombron damaged during enemy phase - your sole goal is to strip revival stones, which the healers can't affect. Option C) This is the hard way. If your offense just sucks and you find yourself needing to engage Alear "early" and can't keep their meter up, just don't bother with Sombron and concentrate on marching around in a big group from Dark Emblem to Dark Emblem, wiping them out with excessive force. Do this 12 times, and Sombron runs out of barrier juice. If you have trouble juggling separate teams, this approach at least enables you to stay mostly clustered up. Healers again don't really matter that much - knock off a lifebar if you have the opportunity, but you just don't care about fighting with Sombron that much in this approach.

So as not to derail this thread, can I suggest moving the question over to the general questions thread? I think that's the place designated for such matters.