Quell

I was always fondof the anima but in my opinilnit is never utilized well, as there're either specialized classes that can use only one or mages that can use all of them rendering the formers practically useless. Honestly, I am of the idea that the polymagic mages should stay an be the standard and to add some mixed magical/physical classes that can only use one of the types of Anima, like an armor with axes and fire, a cavalier with lances and thunder or a bowman with wind.

Yes and no. Let me explain: First thing first, as I mentioned before I do think that units and classes in an easier game are better, simply because they measure better against the challenges of that game. And in part you do too, as an unit that can solo a game will for sure have some utility no matter what. Second, Sacred Stones on hard is an easy game, yes, but not as trivial as to be soloed by all units, while on the other hand Conquest, and Fates in general, might be harder games but not that incredibly much harder. Famously wyvern and ninja!Corrin can solo Conquest (with the latter being practically the reason speedruns of the game are somewhat consistent), and I remember seeing people claiming of clearing with mage, samurai and mercenary Corrin too. On the other hand Cormag might be great but as a matter of fact he doesn't start with enough bulk to solo the game (though I'll admit I didn't experiment that much). Joshua too, despite coming early he will never have enough bulk and so even dodgetanking will eventually fail him. So yes I do think that wyvern and myrm are better in Fates, where Camilla and Ryoma can solo two games. Third and last, I do take into account how units still measure up against their game, like Cormag won't be able to solo the game at first but with a little investment he can easily do it too. What I'm looking at is at how easily an unit or class can help finish the game exclusively by itself not taking into account the rest, Gilliam defenses trivialize most maps in FE8 and that's a good metric by me because it's objective. Not that I don't see merit in your reasoning, if we're talking on who to field I would also agree there're much better units in FE8, but so happens in Conquest, and deciding who to deploy can change quite a lot depending even on personal preferences. Again, the Fighter tree excels in HP and Strength, being practically and arguably the "best class" in both. Rally Strength is usually considered one of the best rallies together with Speed and Defense, not getting much use out of it doesn't make it bad having it in the first place. I'll give you that being damage sponges is bad if the other thing you excel in is killing stuff, especially thanks to a natural high crit rate that make suffering from success a real problem (thank god for bronze weapons), and that effectively knights are also one of the few class lines that has HPs to speak of, but again being able to soak damage is better than being able to tank them, because the game heavily HEAVILY discourage tanking. How? By having multiple debuffing skill aimed at lowering defense stats that shows up even early on, even worse there're multiple and quite common skills that deals flat damage, either percentage or true, completely ignoring defenses, and still on skills there are multiple true damage staking skills that can add a surprising amount of punch to any attack, effective weapons are strong and relatively common, some game mechanics like tag teams can rack up damage quite easily, maps rarely having defensive terrain or choke points to exploit, enemies having high offensive stats, said enemies coming in groups with an AI usually programmed to gang up on you, sometimes even in a good mix of magical and physical units, pretty much anyone that isn't in the fighter tree not having an HP bar to speak of, an entire weapon type dedicated to debuffing, in particular the defense stats, with the arguably best class in the game being the best user of said weapon type. This is just talking macro about it, and I could also go on but I would keep derailing the thread. Being extra fair at lvl 5 promoted 15 Hp St Mg Sk Sp Lk Def Res 36 28 0 18 19 14 14 7 Berserker 33 26 0 16 11 19 23 10 General I see somewhat your point, 3 HP is a lot in Conquest but 9 Def and especially 5 Luck are an heavy penalty. She's definitely an easily killed glass cannon that takes massive damage from everything, especially in general, didn't realize she couldn't surpass the 23 benchmark for at least being useful in den of betrayal. I know she's at the theoretical 31 but at that point she would be better in an actively defensive class line like wyvern lord if I had to invest so much into her. I always reclassed her after my first playthrough so I didn't remember her being this bad in her base class. Still I would ask you to stop trying to derail the thread, ignoring multiple times things I already clearly stated to the point I had to reread my messages again to see if I was that stupid or if did actually already said that, we're already far off topic so can we please drop it? Especially after I even posted numbers and actively tried my hand at the games to prove my points? I'm not trying to offend you in any way, I'm open to get my mind changed like you just did by making me notice Effie is a terrible wall, if you can show me a full armor team cleaning the floor I'll be the first one to give it you that Fates knights are better, but until than if you keep the snark up without adding anything to back it up or that is even more off topic I'll rightfully ignore it.

Super late reply but there's a reason, I hope the moderators won't kill me for doing a bit of necromancy since the topic is still at the top of page 2. So anyway I noticed that a big reason why we're disagreeing on who are the best knights comes down to our personal definition of usefulness. For me it's how "good" they're compared to the game, as in how well they can contribute to completing the main story, but I noticed that for most of you is how good they're in the army, if they have a niche or an utility compared to other units. Both definitions seems interchangeable at first but in reality that's far from the truth, because a bad unit can still be able to stand and solo a game even under harsher circumstances while units that have a niche will still struggle if the game is mostly rigged against them. In other words, Gilliam, for example, can easly clear FE8 without too much trouble but a knights solo of Cq is impossible already on Hard, yet while Gilliam is useless in a LTC or Speedrun the Effie, Benny and knight!Corrin can be great in a raise them all! challenge. Which bring me to the reason why I'm so late: I attempted to clear Sacred Stones with Gilliam, and honestly? It was quite easy, I breezed through it in two day, completing the run on the weekend after my last message. On the other hand I also tried doing a knight solo of Conquest, and well, it's impossible, chapter 10 is unwinnable so you never even get to play much with Benny. So yes, by my definition Gilliam is a much better knight than Effie or Benny. Fates is definitely one of the games where it's the easiest to dodgetank, even besides gimmicky builds and skills and while most weapons are accurate the base mechanics are simply made to work well in tandem with it. Again still, jaggernauting is discouraged heavily by the map and enemy design but, for example, dual guard is made for dodgetanking: if you're attacked by 4 enemies with ~60%hit and you get three rounded you just need to dodge one to survive since you'll guard the other one, for a chance of death that's 12%, which is high but a surprising standard for even FE6 (where dodgetanking is at times a necessity). And again all of this without factoring eventual skills and supports that can help making that CoD 0%. But knights are too slow to take advantage of this, they have too low avoid and the small movement will at times leave them surrounded by enemies that they have no chance to beat. Walls crumble easy, it's just that big damage sponges like Fighters and 'serkers works better as walls in this game than Knight do. Effie, for example, has shaky HP base and growth, I would much more prefer her to be in a class that can use her strength well and can give her some HP for survivability, so yeah Effie is just much better as a Fighter. Not her best class, I give you that, but as a Fighter she gets so many more tools, especially as a Berserker, as while a general!Effie gets a patch at level 5 at the same time 'zerkers get Rally Strength, definitely a much more coveted skill. You're right in thinking that overspecialization cripples Fighters but I don't understand how can you not see how that fucks armors even more in a game where again walling is heavily discouraged. And yes, in a big part that's due to the low movement, you can patch it up with smart use of pair-ups but if you lament that doing so for Fighters is wasting two units turns I don't see it being better or even different for Knights.

As far as bosses goes I love Duma, big dumb eye serpent that has a great showing in its final chapter. Honestly doesn't do anything majorly wrong which is why I love him. As far as maps are concerned I was surprised seeing Cq endgame doing well but than I remembered it is one of the most polarizing chapters in the franchise to the point of having its own diehard fanbase. Honestly I'm of the opinion that the worst fire emblem games have usually the best final maps, Rev too has Anankos which is a surprisingly decent map (just to spite you for hating the game even more). Still, my pick for my favorite final map is Beyond the Darkness. Let me preface this by saying I consider 24 and endgame to be one chapter, just cut into two for hardware reasons like the other GBA games. It's a great final map, summing up basically the whole game and distilling it into a fun a surprisingly tight endgame. I'll admit, the chapter still has quite a few problems that stops it short from being one of the best in the series but in my opinion it is still a really great and underrated map.

Oh hey I can answer this! I even made a topic some years ago, but I was shot down and since I have paper thin skin I got discouraged and didn't end up posting more. Anyways, no you can't max every single stats for all the characters (that you can get in a single playthrough): Constitution screws everything over as there's no way beside body rings or promotion to increase it and you need way too much money to max it for every character... but as I argued in my previous post maxing CON is debatably a buff like every other stat, as Rescuing is major game mechanics that you give up in doing so. So, is it possible to max every non-con stats for every character? Yes, but again with some caveat. First, you have to heavily RNG abuse the game, especially the level ups, while also doing lots of degenerate stuff like arena abusing (and boss abusing if you want to max weapon ranks too). Second, you can only do so by going to the Illian route, as you need to arena grind in ch17. Other than that it is relatively easy sailing, if hundreds of hours of RNG abusing don't scares you.

Honestly good point, I hadn't thought at it like that. Still, it being a tool instead of being forced makes wary fighter downside much more manageable. The game is easy, you can get away with much more. Yes Seth is busted, 8 mov paladins, JAVELINS etc. etc. etc. and all that but General and GK have their decent niches. The maps are also smaller and reward tanking, with some of the peskiest ones getting almost trivialize by high def units. I don't want to derail this thread but this is wrong though, I understand personal preferences influence gameplay quite a lot but Fighters are definitely better than knights: first and foremost they have more movement, which, while pair-up, rescue dancing and yada yada Yada, is still a boon. Second they're middling but not bad stat wise, can act very well as walls thanks to HP being one of their selling point, or as wall-breakers, boss killers, or, most commonly, as support partners. Hell I would argue they're the second best tag/pair-up class line, with Berserker being one of the best partner in crimes. They do miss a lot of benchmark for being this useful though, but unlike knights usually you can reach those thresholds with little to no investment. You can give them enough skill to hit but it's extremely hard to give enough speed to Benny to not get doubled, let alone double itself. They are arguably the second worst nohrian class, but by far not the worst class in the game (Blacksmiths are unsalvagable, pun fully intended). Surprised this is still a quite diffused belief, yeah they have a low base speed and, for Barthe, growth but most of the "early" game enemies are slow enough to not being able to double them. In particular Barthe is famous for being a common early promote wall, as 9 speed is enough to not get doubled by almost anything before chapter 13 (I'm talking about hard mode here). In fact both Wendy and Bors, while having a terrible 3 spd base stat, have a decent 40% growth that plus the busted general promotion can make them surprisingly effective dodge walls. Nothing I would advise using, at all, but speed is not the biggest concern of FE6 knights.

Tough question! Honestly I would put FE8, 11 and 12 (with reclassing), and engage knights as better, with Fates' ones that avarage out with FE7 and Echoes. I haven't played the Tellius game in a long time so I can't really comment, for FE5 I would argue they would even be almost top tier usefel if they weren't so much an hassle to get (seriously whoever programmed how to get Xavier needs some Valium). They're still almost at the top but I would rather have Effie and Ignatius in other classes, even Fighter. I find dodge tanking is more reliable than tanking. Of course if you have the strength benchmark memorized and reach the requirements you can make it work and more reliably but otherwise I find dodge tanking better, as getting some misses usually is still required even in sound and common strategy for quite a few chapter (especially those near the end). There're also the breaker skills, which honestly would work better, but the fact they come so late makes them rarely matter (except for shurikenbreaker which is the best way to tackle Ryoma lunge trains, so we'll worth investing imo). Though I must say I did find some relative success with armor Benny, but he's basically built for it so it doesn't surprise me, yet he still fell short of being able to tank them saws for me, which probably soured me about the class in general in these games. Yesn't. Fighter is better because in and itself is just a better class: yeah it does need some fixing too but Fighters already have something to work with, they don't need their weaknesses to be patched up to be useful. Doesn't help that wary fighter only comes late when already promoted, so the *fix* only happens when Fighters are getting either SoL or Rally Strenght. At the end of the day it's a toss between being an unreliable wall or an unreliable wallbreaker, and with how the game works I find that walls are easy to crumble.

...Am I the only one that thinks Fates armors were extremely underwhelming? I mean not necessarily the characters (hell Benny is decent even if he remains in the General line) but they are by far the worst norian classes and some of the worst in the game. Still I can see that on paper they are good units, they finally get skills that helps them a lot in what they need, pairing up mostly fixes their movement issues, the games encourage good unit balance and niche uses, hell they were even an anti-meta pick back when the PvP existed. But I can't still even remotely say armor is good: first and foremost the games extremely discourage tanking in any shapes and form. This is more an issue with Conquest (but it applies to the others too), the ninja line is by far one of the best in the game, if not outright the best one, and while on paper armor is sold as their counter this fails so spectacularly outside said PvP it's almost comical; the fact daggers are the best type of weapon in the game already speaks volumes about favoritism, let alone the incredible amount of wallbreaking skills ninja gets. What's even more aggravating is the existence of a number of said skills, Inevitable End in particular, that completely shut-down practically all the niches plays the class have. Which brings me to my second point: the skill tree of the knight/general line helps quite a lot in patching up the weaknesses of the class but doesn't do anything about having said classes catch up with all the others. For example, yes wary fighter is great but it doesn't give them any new tool as it serves exclusively as a way to patch up the poor speed of the class. They don't get inspiration like you would expect a general to, or any other positive skills that would make them worth fielding. Knights are not unsalvagable but definitely some of the weakest in the 3 games.

The best reclass system so far was in Three Houses, well implemented into the story and required work and care. My favorite one is from Fates, in particular Conquest since the other two are less refined, as it strikes a good balance between grind and reward without it being too free, giving most of your units a niche (I obviously don't count DLC, logbook and all the additional stuff that makes it much worse). Still, I wouldn't want either in a new entry, as in the first place I don't think it should be a mainstay and more a welcome feature that pops up from time to time when it can be well implemented into the story and gameplay.

Honestly, it depends. I do not mind ambush spawns per sé, I do have quite a few bad experiences with them though and I see why they're so hated, and I do admit that I have participated in this argument before indulging in a little bit of trolling over the years, but yes I can say I do agree with you that they are usually good when well foreshadowed. But I'll bring a counteragument: the Rutger ambush spawn in ch4 of FE6, despite being incredibly well foretold and announced, is often regarded as one of the worst in the whole series (I disagree on this though, even if I too have some problems with it). There is a point when the reinforcements are just no fun and them being an ambush only subtracts from it.

I'm personally simping for magic armor, we're sorely missing those. Seriously, aside from memes and stereotypes why we still haven't got one of those? Hell, even Fates skip on them, with the BR side not having even a singular armor class iirc, despite introducing quite a few mixed phys/magic classes. I'm miffed, I want a axe/thunder general, come on IS!

Having fell for this meme I can safely say it's not a great pairing: first, it's surprisingly complex to keep the parents togheter, in 3/4/5 Eryn usual strategies keeps her far from your main group, meaning it's har to have them build support. Second, the bases and growth don't complement the children well, as both are supposed to be speedy reliable units and Accost and Critical are far from that, they don't have enough skill to use them reliably and to top it all off this pairing is one that ends up with the worst speeds, which is a major downside. Hell, I would argue that Azelle and other Holy Blood parents are better defensively because they give better HP. All in all it's not a terrible pairing, but not one I would recommend, actually I would swap Alec for Noice, as Nihil gives both children a cool niche and his growths work better with them (though I'm sinning as I've never tried this pairing). NoicexAyra is fun, yes it's hard but it's not like LexxAyra is exactly that much smoother of a ride (they get 100 points through conversation but there's still 400 to go, not exactly fast). Also the kids, being naturally gifted in Skill and having high speed from the mother enjoy the dad skills this time around.

Good breakdown, it has been a bit since the last "who's the best father" topic. The only problem I have is having the "just one perfect dad" clause, but overall I wouldn't change that much in the rankings, especially with how much subjective they are.

Is it FE8 bashing time? FE8 bashing time. And I'll bring forth even a hottake too: Phantom Ship, aka Ch11 Ephraim Route, is one of the worst chapter in the franchise, let alone just for the GBA games. This chapter doesn't have anything going for it, instead it's an amalgam of elements that alone wouldn't be really be that bad (except for maybe the FoW), but put togheter show exactly the worst weaknesses of IS in terms of making a "hard map" and in general map design. Like, who the hell thought making a rout map with FoW and extremely restricted movement was a fine idea?

I'm glad this hasn't devolved into yet another "this map sucks" topic (not that it's a bad one, just a bit overdone). Well, I have a personal bone to pick with chapter 9 of Genealogy "For Whose Sake". The chapter in itself is not so bad, just a bit of a slog but that can be said about most of the chapters of FE4, the problem I have with this one is a game mechanic's one: in Genealogy the enemies' ai is programmed in a way so that they'll ignore you (read "run away") if they can't hurt any of your units, which sounds reasonable even if a bit annoying. And it usually isn't that annoying if it wasn't for a few troubling facts: 1) Most enemies in this chapter are flyers, wyvern knights in particular, so it's quite easy for them to successfully run away 2) This map was created with flyers in mind, with for example a huge patch of untraversable terrain smacked right in the middle 3) The progression is partially tied to some of these wyvern riders So it's easy to get "softlocked" because the ai decided to not engage any of your units. So yeah, this chapter frustrates me.