arem

These are pretty much my picks.

There is that one gambit that lets you survive at one hp, but yeah I am guessing most people don't see those proc too often. Even then the trade off between having the defiant abilities and not having any hp is kinda questionable.

I personally do explore, battle, explore, mostly because I just don't like the monastery very much and want to do something else, but that does end up being just one battle a month a lot of the time. If you really want do dive deep into it though, you are going to have to make a lot of assumptions. My tank characters, for example, end up being in a lot more battles than the rest of my crew.

When I started this, I wanted to be generous and I also did not know we were considering no grind. The lower the level is, the worse bow knight looks. Leonie has 27 speed at level 30, so she is not doubling anything. Bernadette has 23 speed, etc. Honestly, the players most interested in class skills are going to be grinders, because they are going to be able to pick up a lot of skills. Since the community seems to be saying death blow plus hit plus 20 as well as bowfaire is an unfair advantage, I did some testing. With my original build, my Shamir crit for 99 on a war master, more than enough to kill them because they only had 75 hp. Without bowfaire and deathblow Shamir crits for 60 some, but that is still enough to kill if she hits twice and one of them is a crit. The demonic beasts start with 100 hp, but they have zero luck so she should be able to crit twice. So she still one round kos everything but the knight, Edel, and the beasts, and she will be able to carve off one life bar off a beast if its armor is down. If we are taking this as the standard bow knight build, they are actually worse off than I described. With that build, and level 40 again, Bernadette has 27 attack speed with a now weightless forged silver bow, which is not enough to double anything, or to even prevent doubling anything without stat ups. Leonie and Petra have 33 and 34 attack speed, respectively, which, is only enough to double the gremories and the beasts. Felix can hit the same 33 speed if he takes speed plus 2 instead of something up there, enough to double the slow things before stat boosting. Darting blow seems better than death blow at first. That brings Bernadette to 33 speed, fast enough to double a gremorie without boosts, although she can't double anything else. Leonie goes up 38 speed, just past that 37 attack speed sweet spot, and she will be able to double most of the enemies. Nevertheless, there are still 14 enemies left she cannot double (with point blank volley anyway) and the sniper can. Moreover, damage is becoming an issue. Leonie has 27 strength at level 40. A forged silver bow has 13 might, which takes her to 40. She is gets bowfair from her class, which takes her to 45. Unfortunately, the gremories have 31 protection and 57 health. That's only 28 damage and there are the weakest defensively after the slither mages. If we assume death blow, not hit +20 or darting blow, she is at 51 attack. That’s 40 damage. Bowfaire makes this easy to reach with a battalion. Without it, she is going to need nine battalion damage to get a one round ko, which is doable, but requires the King of Lions battalion and is plus 10 damage. If she was just a little bit faster, she could get the slither mages down too. Unfortunately, the next most vulnerable thing is mortal Savant, even if she can manage the 35 attack speed need to double, she is only hitting for 50, not enough to kill. Felix has 6 more strength on avaege, which take us to 64, just barely enough, and only if you give him the highest attack battalion on your team. To be fair, it is a good fit for him and his authority weakness. Anyway, the point of this is that an average stat bow knight without boosters can kill only a few enemies in one one, while snipers take out almost all of them What about with a brave bow? The big problems with brave weapons is that you have a limited amount of them and a limited amount of material to fix them. The enemies who drop it also drop a random amount of it. You also may want to save whatever Wootz steel you have for another character. If you have one, a brave now also weighs 13, so strong Bow knights like Felix get weighed down by 4 and a weaker bow knight gets weighed down by 5, making quading difficult. Assuming you have one available, however, its an eleven attack weapon. A hypothetical bow knight Felix with death blow has 55 attack, before battalion (33str plus + 6 death blow+ 5 bowfaire from class+ 11 brave bow). An enemy war master has at least 45 attack sped and generally has 49 attack speed as well 35 protection and 75 health. That is only 40 damage, t not enough to kill. Even with the King of Lion Corp, he hits 60 damage, still not enough to kill. If you upgrade the bow you are at 64 damage. Still not enough, although agonizingly close to the 69 hp 51 protection grapplers. A darting blow Leonie is about 13 of attack behind that. However, she also still has 33 speed, which means it might be wiser for her to eat carrots and go for quading enemies.

I have acknowledged Leonie as a good Bow Knight before, but you are really selling her short here. Leonie is probably the best bow knight in the game, Seriously, she has the highest speed growth (60 percent) and the second highest speed base of the starting characters (9 just one less than Petra). She is the second fastest character in the game (again only one point behind Petra), and you probably want to do something with that speed, not put her in sniper where her speed is ignored. She also has her own built in double hit technique. If you want to to call her a relatively good bow knight, I would like to know who you consider to be a great or excellent bow knight. Leonie is also one of the most difficult students to recruit early since you can't just gift spam her support to B and will probably have to put Byleth on a horse for a while to get early recruitment. Shamir, by contrast, can easily join any route. Her growths are low, but considering her good bases she ends up looking like an average bow knight, as I showed above. No I did not. I kinda assumed the average bow knight would not be training heavy armor. I am also curious as to your skill layouts. My snipers had bow prowess, death blow, hit plus 20, bow crit, and bowfaire. Bowfaire and Bow crit take a while, but having almost everything in bows helps and you can use close counter and strength plus two before you get them. When I was making my examples, I tried to pick the most obvious and likely choices, not the super optimum ones, to make a generic character, and that build is just the bow line skills, plus death blow, which seems like an obvious pick up. I am kinda wondering what you would want to give up to put weight minus three on instead. I assumed darting blow would take the place of bow crit on a bow knight, as they are less likely to be a crit build, but i don;t know what you want ot give up for weight minus three. Bowfaire? Anyway, weight -3 reduces the weight of silver bow down to nothing, so that's two less carrots in the analysis above if you want to assume its in the builds. Still 19 left to get the fastest war master. I am also kinda wondering what your skill acquisition looks like. You guys seem to be raising lances, flying, bows, axes, riding, and now heavy armor. I guess you will also want some authority at some point. Again I was trying to make a generic progression and fighter can be gotten into with bows and helps raise bow rank. Five levels of Myrmidon does not raise his average speed materially, but the two speed skill puts him at the same break points as darting blow Shamir and takes the same number of skills slots, so that is probably better. I got 35 killer + 10 volley + 20 battalion Fraldarius + 5 (crit ring)+bow crit skill + natural Dex. That adds up to 80-100 crit on Shamir for me. Sometimes her crit chance is higher than her hit chance. The battalion has an offensive gambits, but hitting is not that hard with gambit boosts and I almost only use them for things like armor breaking. Its really not the most optimum gambit, but I already have characters with stride, retribution, and invincible shield (or whatever it is) and I did not really need more support gambit. Indech Sword fights have 10 crit and the retribution skills, so that's another option. You could argue that the ring and plus a 20 crit battalion is a more limited resource, but the are two of both of them (Goneril Valks also have 20 cirt) andshe ended up with her equipment because everyone else on my team took their favorite stuff and she grabbed the best of what was left. If she needed a flying battalion or a speed ring she would be kinda SOL. Its okay to feel that way, but mathematically speaking its very consistent. You really aren't going to need to crit twice to kill so you are just hoping to get at least one crit from the two shots of Hunter's volley. If you get up to eighty crit like I did, you have a 96 percent chance of getting at least one crit. With a somewhat more manageable 70 crit, you have a 91 percent change of getting at least one crit. Even at 60 crit you are looking an 84 percent chance to get one crit. Also, you don't need to go crit for sniper, I am just making the best of the free crit that comes with the volley. Lots of enemies can still be killed with just a forged steel or silver bow or something.

The hill can be a trap on this one. I actually don't now what makes Edel set it on fire, and sometimes she just forgets. If it happens, It slows you down (at least if you are not all fliers) and sticks your right in between Edel and Claude's forces, whihc is right where you don't want to be. It counter intuitive, but I find it easy to fight both armies at once around the two bridges which cross the little river. The balista can be somewhat ignored if you keep you squishy units out of the way. It should not be able to do anything to your armored classes. Try to have them engage the enemy armors while you softer units hang back. Just remember to have something for Hilda when she appears Dodgy units are a pain in this game. I think the natural counter is archers fighting at pretty close range. It looks like Cyril is your only bow character. Does he have the hit plus 20 skill? It can help. Mages also usually have better than normal hit so you might want to try Annette. I also think the Gambit formula has different accuracy mechanics so that might be another solution. Don't be afraid to really go back in time with the divine pulse. I have had to have go back two or three whole turns just to undo a move that has worked out poorly. You don't have to just restart.

Okay, I think I've sold some of you on Sniper Shamir. Now let's try some other characters. I first picked Felix because he was my other Sniper and I thought his 55 speed growth and high base speed would make him a clear bow knight. I ran the numbers though and for noble, fighter, archer, sniper bow knight Felix and I get 31 speed. (actually 30.95) That's good, but without darting blow (he can't get it) he is at 29 effective speed after being weighed down. You actually need to more carrots to hit the doubling thresholds I was talking about earlier. Sylvain is worse off in that he has only 28 speed and lower strength for an effective speed of 27. Looking at the games other natural male archers, Ashe has 29 speed, Ignatz has 28 speed, and Cyril has 30, but I don't think that is right because he is stuck as commoner forever. Either way, none of those guys are going to be doubling without investment. Bernadette has 27 speed, but only 25 strength, which weighs her down and makes her doubling ability the same as Shamir's Now Leonie does makes a fantastic bow knight. That I won't deny. She's rocking 33 speed. With darting blow that's 39 speed, although only 36 attack speed with weight due to lower strength. You could hit the doubling thresholds with considerably less investment, although hitting the fastest war masters will be tricky. Then again, she also has point blank volley for those edge cases. Petra has 34 natural speed, although if you have Petra I don't know why she is not a wyvern rider. Ingrid also favors bow knight with a natural 32 speed, although again I think I would rather have her on a flying mount. Again, I am not trying to argue that snipers are always better than bow knights. I really like them personally because they feel like a diamond in the rough to me, but a bow knight is an incredible class too. I am just trying to ague that hunter's volley should not be evaluated as something you use for two or three levels until bow knight, because lots of characters are going to want to stay there. That's a choice I guess, although I think you are really underselling the killing ability here. I agree Shamir is not a statistical powerhouse, but she was still a very efficient killer for me. Just pass her a killer bow and watch what two shots at 80 percent crit can do. I was usually able to take a whole life bar off beasts if their armor was out of the way and 75 hp war masters were no problem. I don't think I had any chip characters in my run. I used a couple characters taught were almost entirely defensive (dedue and a strength screwed Ingrid whose only use was avoid tanking) but for the most part I just had Byleth and Dimitri lure then one rounded anything that got pulled forward. Rinse and repeat

Cooking bonuses don't work on the last level because it is one of those double levels. At least you can save. Maybe it is unfair of me to pick the level where cooking is not a factor, but I found it significantly harder than the levels that came before and optimizing for it seems ideal. It also resolves the issue of people arguing that you should be cooking for magic or strength or whatever to hit OHKO thresholds or something. Thanks for the weight formula. It looks she should have thirty one strength. A forged silver bow has a weight of 8, so its looks like my guess was right. A brave bow weighs twelve by the way, so you would have to increase all the above numbers by four to get to the quad hit number.

I think this is where we are having a disagreement. Everyone prepare yourselves I am going to try to use numbers. Let's assume we are playing on Maddening (no new game plus). I am using Shamir as my hypothetical archer because she is the stereotypical three houses archer for me and she has already come up in this thread. She also has great bases, which really helps in Maddening. According to a spreadsheet I downloaded a while ago, a hypothetical level 40 Shamir who was mostly a Sniper then changed to a Bow knight at level 30 has 26.5 speed on average. That number may be wrong, because I am not completely sure of her joining level (she starts at sniper base speed) and also because I am kind of a moron, but it is the best number I have right now. I will round up to 27 to be charitable, but I think at her strength is low enough that she will lose at least two attack speed due to the weight of her bow. That's how much she loses from a forged silver bow in my game and I don't want to go learn the weight formula. That brings her to 25 attack speed. Looking at enemy stats on Path of the Dagger, the only convenient Maddening endgame save I have right now, enemy attack speed ranges from 14 to 57. However, the 14 is on a lone, stationary fortress knight who you are probably not going to attack with an archer and is pretty irrelevant anyway. The 57 is on a single assassin, that I will also just ignore as an outlier. The slowest enemy unit there are multiple copies are gremories and beasts with 30 attack speed. With default speed, Shamir is going to be doubled by all of the enemies on this map. You probably are not actually being retaliated against as a bow knight, but I am just trying to illustrate how far we are from doubling. However, I suppose you are going to want to have darting blow, because Shamir can get into Pegasus knight pretty easily and that skill is ridiculous. That brings her up to 31 speed, which still can't double anything but the fortress knight. If you want to double anything else, you going to have to give her two speed carrots. That's really doable, I admit, although we already have to move Shamir into flying lessons, grind out some experience in Pegasus knight, and use two stat boosters that could have gone to someone else. Also, It's important note you can't rely on this. My Shamir would have actually needed seven carrots to reach this threshold, because stat gains are random and you occasionally get cursed, but on average that's what it takes. Also that is only enough speed to double the slowest enemies. To double most of the enemies you are going to need 37 attack speed. That is enough to double all of the mages and mortal servants as well as Edel, assuming her attack speed does not change when she switches weapons. That takes 6 speed carrots to reach. That's about two months of active farming. Still pretty doable, but this route only has 20 months, I think. Plus you are probably going to be doing some quests and prologues for some of that time. Even with that investment, however, there are still plenty of enemies you can't double. The level has thirteen war masters (plus reinforcements) and their speed ranges from 40 to 49. To double the slowest war master, you need 43 speed.. That's twelve carrots, or about four months of your academy life with restarting every time you fail to get a carrot. To double the fastest war master, you need another 9 carrots, or 21 carrots total. That's really a lot of investment and I don't think you can make that without significant favoritism. Also note it is going to be harder for dudes who can't go darting blow. Alternatively, you can run a Sniper. The Sniper can double everything with absolutely no speed gains, even the assassin. Its a zero investment character who is also going to hit with more crit and accuracy than a bow knight. Then you can take all those stat boosters you did not use and pour them int your lord or Byleth and laugh as they become an unstoppable god. Up to you.

No,. Snipers pretty much hunter's volley 24/7. I am referring to the really quite substantial plus fifteen to hit and ten to crit you get with hunter's volley. It also gives extra range to make up for the bow knights range and more than makes up for the plus three to speed the hypothetical dismounted bow knight gets. Yes, you can still double with a brave bow, but that requires a semi rare resource you might prefer to go to someone else and you will do significantly less real damage than a forged killer or silver bow,. I am kinda with you on growths, but I still think it is advantage worth mentioning, and people seem really invested in growths. One of the reasons the Wyvern Lord is considered the end all be all is its excellent growths, for example.

Dedue and Gilbert are both excellent fortress knights. Dedue in particularly is amazing in the armored knight line for most of the game. Gilbert somewhat less so, but his main problem, as well as Dedue's problem, is that magic is everywhere in the Blue Lion endgame and being physically invulnerable just does not cut it anymore. Raphael seems to do be best as Wyvern Lord or Warmaster. I am not sure how much of that is Raphael and how much of that is just those classes being good, however.

You all realize you can just stay in sniper and that Maddening gives you a lot of reason to do so right? You are basically trading three move and canto for better growths, more hit, more crit, and the ability to double anything in the game on player phase. I admit losing canto sucks, but the ability to gain what was effectively thirty points of speed and double an assassin more than made up for for me.

I second this. Hunter's volley was a huge help in my Maddening run. The units i dumped stat boosters in did not need it, but my more mediocre units were able to use to it for easy one round potential. With a killer bow I think you can't actually get less than 60 crit and my Shamir had more like 80-100 crit.

I did not notice that. I guess I never tried to have Hubert rush someone with his fists. That's really weird, because I was pretty sure they restricted mounted gauntlet users just because the animation would look funny from horse back. Maybe more signs that the game was rushed?

Wow, I just checked the save, and she has 23 speed at level 38. She got absolutely cursed. And yet still one of my best killers. This may be explaining why I found Oath of the Dagger so hard... As for Dedue, he shows off how much defense can snowball if built correctly. He starts with twelve with his personal, which is way beyond everyone else, but not game breaking by itself. But put him on a tree he is at thirteen. Survive the first mock battle (which sucks, but is still easier with the blue lions thanks mostly to him), and you can pick up an iron shield. That brings him up to 15. Do Jeralt's fetch quest and give Dedue the Church of Seiros soldiers battalion. That brings him to sixteen, but after you level the batalion up he is at 18. I don't have an early game save handy, but I am pretty sure that is high enough that the sword thieves won't be able to hurt him and the archers will only be able to hurt him with poison. And he has a coin flip chance of getting even more defense with every level up. Its more than just surviving multiple rounds of battle, I frequently left him in a bush or something and let four enemies tink off his armor while the rest of my group did something else. Raphael, by contrast, is at thirteen if you take the same steps, the same as Dedue was when he started.