TriforceLegend

Yea it would be more for the fun of having everyone on horses. Just figured when I do my BL run rather than min/max I'd just do something different. I've been looking up some other ideas for meme/challenge runs. I want it to be something that's doable and won't make me want to bang my head against a wall because I made it too hard.

So I'm coming up on level 20 with most of my team at this point (Marianne being the exception at ~25 due to healing -I'll be recruiting Mercedes once Marianne becomes a dancer). The difficulty has been pretty variable. Having access to battalions right away definitely made the early game very easy. I pseudo low-manned the first few months by utilizing the characters I knew were going to remain in my core team, assigning the house members that weren't (Lorenz, Hilda, Raph) as adjutants and then filling the remaining spots with recruits and only using them for battalion utility. So I had characters like Sylvain, Ingrid, and Constance providing impregnable walls, strides, etc but not interacting with enemies on the map. This helped me maximize experience gains early on. Once I started recruiting my final team members things became a bit more difficult because some of the characters I was swapping in didn't have access to impregnable wall and/or stride and experience is spread more thinly. Now I've gotten most of the group trained up in authority and need to re-assess who has which battalions. I also haven't been equipping items like staves or shields. The difficulty may be ramping up enough now with the paralogues that it's worth taking a look at some of that stuff. I've only completed two paralogues so far, Lorenz's and Sothis' -both of which I thought were fairly easy. I later read about the warp trick with Lorenz's mission, but I routed all enemies as I hadn't thought of warping (in fact I didn't actually have warp learned at that point). I attempted Balthus' and it felt damn near impossible so I'm going to wait until I have more of the group on mounts at level 20 so I can try to get my guys grouped up faster. I've mostly stuck with the class progression I posted above with a few exceptions: (1) I put Lysethia in Valkyrie. I may actually keep her there as the extra movement, canto, and +1 range seem really nice. I know it's a trade-off with her maybe not being quite as powerful as if she were a Gremory, but I'm enjoying it so far so we'll see. (2) I also took -or am in the process of taking- Felix and Yuri through Brigand. (3) Since Leonie was a Pegasus Knight in my BE run, I took her through Brigand as well and just spent the 500 renown to give her the mastery abilities from PK. I'm not sure what everyone's final skill set will be, but it seems that there's more than enough time to master several intermediate classes with how slow regular exp is gained. The biggest benefit to NG+ so far (other than Battalions) was getting my professor level up early for the extra points. It's been great to be able to utilize the extra activity points for additional battles for leveling up class experience and for keeping everyone motivated for lessons. I'm enjoying the run so far, not regretting doing NG+ at all as I like skipping some of the grindy bits. I do sort of wish I'd had the guts to go with Classic as I'm playing as though deaths are permanent -just couldn't bring myself to actually make it so as I'd be pissed if a character I worked hard on died. I may even do my BL run on NG+ Maddening/Classic. I'm considering some sort of "theme" like all horse-mounted classes. Was considering doing an all Bow Knight run with the exception of a couple of healers (also horse-mounted).

Why is that? I've heard physical tanking at the endgame doesn't work because everyone can basically be OHKO'd anyway. How do you pull enemies without dodge tanking? No, you can only use renown to purchase skills previously learned by that character. In my case, everyone is either a character I haven't used before or taking a totally different path. I hadn't looked up anything prior to my first run and mastered a bunch of useless classes and just did what I thought sounded interesting. Luckily hard mode was a joke and it didn't matter, but I didn't set myself up to get the advantage of being able to purchase skills in an NG+ run.

I just finished up with the DLC story the other day and found Constance to be a bit annoying (sorry Constance fans) so I decided to slot Hapi in her place (as Valkyrie, not Dark Flier). I really liked the shenanigans you could pull off with Yuri's relic and Foul Play so I'm also keeping him in the group. Side note: Holy crap was the DLC HARD! Nothing like Hard mode in the main game. Anyway, I'm 3 chapters in on my GD run and have just been low-manning the missions in order to utilize all three adjutant spots for the in-house characters I need to level up, but don't want to actually use in my core group (Hilda, Lorenz, and Raph). This seemed to be a good way to maximize XP by doubling up. Plan is to do that until the time-skip and then swap Lorenz out for another guard, like Balthus or Caspar. So far things have been pretty easy, but have required more care. I put it on Casual, but I've been playing as though deaths are permanent and so far no one has died. Granted it's NG+, but it feels like a good step in the right direction that's forcing me to think about game mechanisms I completely ignored on Hard mode. Perhaps I'll do a true Maddening run with BL next. All of these tips have been extremely helpful, so thanks! I do have one more question. Which characters are important to level up in Heavy Armor for the -3 Weight ability? Should I do it for all of my fliers, and Felix, as they'll be the most likely to be avoid tanks later in the game? I assume it's not worth doing on my archers and mages, whom I'll be doing my best to keep out of enemy range, right?

To answer the question of class paths, here's what my full plan is (taking into account some recommendations above). I swapped Ignatz in place of Shamir, removed Warlock from Lysithea's path, and Gremory from Mercedes path. I'm still wondering if I should swap someone out for Hilda. From what I'm hearing it sounds like having a physical tank early is good so would a good plan be to have Hilda tank early with an armored class and then move into Wyvern Lord toward the endgame -maybe something like Fighter -> Armored Knight -> Wyvern Rider -> Wyvern Lord? And would Yuri be the one she should replace? Or should it be Ferdinand or Petra as I'll have a ton of fliers at that point (is that a liability to have so much weakness to archers)? Lastly, regarding Byleth -why do I need to train in axes? I was going Falcon Knight intending to stick with swords because of the Sword of the Creator so I figured Falcon Knight was a better fit (although I haven't tried a sword-wielding Falcon Knight before). In fact, it's one of the reasons I wanted to go with female Byleth for this run. Still have to do some more research on adjutants as this thread has made me realize there's still a lot I don't know about how they work. Thanks again for all the comments. This has been super helpful. I finished my BE run today and am excited to do this after I play through the side story!

Thanks for the response! re: Byleth, for my CF play I did Myrmidon -> Mercenary -> Swordmaster and then when the Enlightened One class became available I switched. Hadn’t planned it as I didn’t know it was coming. For the next play I planned to go Brigand/Pegasus Knight for their mastery abilities and then skip advanced classes to go straight into Falcon Knight. I can’t cite the source for the comment on tanks, but what I’d read was that enemies can pretty much one shot everyone and that avoid tanking was the way to go. Is that not the case? You mention the Mt bonus from Alois to Leonie... where does that bonus come from? I had only considered the class (And support level) of the adjutant to make them Guards and didn’t know that specific pairings had bonuses. Lastly, I had planned on getting the movement bonus for Marianne and using Mercedes as my main healer. Why keep Mercedes as Bishop? Is going to Gremory not an upgrade as a healer? I kind of thought it was a neutral class that benefited both white and black mages.

Hello! First off, Fire Emblem Three Houses is my second Fire Emblem game, first being Awakening. That was 7+ years ago and I don't really remember too much about it and assume I played on normal difficulty, possibly hard, and most likely on casual mode. Bottom line is I would not consider myself to be a veteran of the series and I have not played any other tactical RPGs. When I started my first play-through with the Black Eagles I decided to try Hard mode (casual) and have been surprised at how easy it is. There have been a couple of spots where I had to re-think my strategy and unwind things via Divine Pulse, but overall I haven't had much trouble and have been playing as if on classic, trying to keep everyone alive. I've been able to play quite recklessly, rushing enemies, splitting my forces, etc. I didn't look up guides because I wanted to experience it on my own and my character paths are a mess and very sub-optimal. I haven't had to pay much attention to passives, supports, etc. It seems strange to me that there's an even easier difficulty! So now I think I want to try maddening (NG+) on my next play-through with the Golden Deer house. I know I could do a 100% optimal group by not factoring characters I like/dislike, class variety, etc, but I do want to factor that in a bit as it's part of the enjoyment of the experience for me. So that being said, here's the group I've put together on paper. Looking for some comments on if it seems viable, any recommended adjustments (and why), etc. PLEASE NO SPOILERS! I'm on chapter 16 of my first play-through (will probably finish tomorrow) and am just doing some planning, but I haven't seen any of the endings and haven't seen any of the non-Black Eagle path stuff. Ok, so here it is: Byleth (F) - Falcon Knight Claude - Barbarossa Lysithia - Gremory Marianne - Dancer Leonie - Bow Knight Shamir (possibly Ignatz) - Sniper Petra - Wyvern Lord Ferdinand - Wyvern Lord Mercedes - Gremory Felix - War Master Yuri - Trickster Constance - Dark Flier With Raphael, Hilda, and Caspar being Guard adjutants, since it sounds like physical tanks aren't very good in Maddening. So...what do you think? Can I make it through Maddening with this group or am I setting myself up for failure? Thanks in advance! -Johnny