rdrouyn

I'm also curious to learn if there's some way to manipulate the party members that appear at the restaurant. It would certainly help with raising happiness levels for mercenaries.

I do like combat arts and hope they make a comeback. They've left a lot of meat on that bone. There could be more character specific combat arts as a way to add more personality to characters. One of things I disliked about Engage was making the rings bestow combat arts onto the characters and that makes all the characters feel superfluous.

After some careful consideration, I've made the following amends: Faramir: B- (Above Paramitis) - He's just not that good, is expensive and has limited availability Thaddy: B (Below Czene) - There are some ways to gain serious cash with Thaddy I hadn't considered. Stealing rare arrows from archers is the most common target but there are potions, orbs, daggers and many other things. They are all quite risky and evasion doesn't last long enough to be effective. But you can use other methods, like protecting him with guard or provoking enemies with low hit rates and stealing from them. He can also mess with enemies with the Provoke plus Hide combo. Provoke is such an abusable ability, with that alone he has merits. Edit: I was able to steal the bolt knife from Riddle using Thaddy. He switches to the Assasins' Dagger to attack, and you can easily steal it with Thaddy as long as you get lucky with the critical strike. Owen: B (Where Izerna used to be) - Yeah, I'm using Owen and I get it now. His downside isn't that bad. The maps where he becomes annoying are fewer than I initially thought. Playing through Chapter 4 with Physic was nice. Izerna: Top of B- - Still a perfectly good character that can be used if you want to save money. And her promotion is nice. But yeah I don't think it is optimal to use her over Owen anymore, at least for story maps. Edit: She is recommended for Ch 9 and Impossible Dream over Owen.

B tier is by no means a bad rating. It is just indicative of his lack of availability during the early game. He misses out on nearly half of the maps in the game, and that has to count for something. By the time you start Chapter 2, Elbert is level 4, Leon/Adel might be around level 3 or 4 while Reese is level 1 dealing small amounts of damage with his rapier. He doesn't become a A tier unit until he gets his Gram sword and that is 5 or 6 chapters in. His charisma skill is pretty good, so I may be underrating him a bit. Furniture is far too expensive to be practical. Unless you have some infinite money exploit or some build to guarantee injury, it is unlikely that you'll buy more than one piece of furniture in a run. Also consider that you have to spend around 15k 22k on one piece of furniture to get armsthrift, but with that amount of money you can buy 5 or more high end weapons for him. Making the investment kind of pointless. Edit: Also, comparisons to Sigurd are not accurate. Sigurd starts out with great combat from map 1 with his Silver Sword and he's by far your best combat unit for the first half of the game. Only Sylvia and Forsetti Leywn can really compare to his power level. He doesn't struggle for the first few maps while he levels up like Reese does.

Yeah, this tier list is from the perspective of someone who doesn't know much about the inner workings of the crippling system, aside from the small pieces of information in the weapon descriptions. Sylvis and Arthur have abilities that supposedly help them injure enemies but I have no idea how to use them properly. They could be amazing skills that change their value, but I have no idea since the wounding/crippling system is a black box. From my experiments, all of the skills are too unreliable to be something that brings a noticeable amount of value. As far as spells go, I remember having some success with the Blizzard spell. I think the text says it adds 30 to the injury success rate, seems like that spell would be pretty good. More than I did with the Apeiron and the Lightning spell.

Interesting, that's not how I thought crippling worked at all. I thought there would be some carry over from early attacks or something, but it is all pure RNG.

That's true. I probably use it once or twice per run. But when I have to use it, it usually prevents a unit from dying or from getting captured and losing all of their gear. Its a peace of mind thing.

That's fair. Do you even use Izerna at all? I can't imagine using both Owen and Izerna in most maps. And that means missing out on the un-crippling spell which is huge.

Ah interesting. So weapons that say 2x crippling chance do nothing to non-wounded enemies? How the hell are you supposed to wound an enemy and have them survive several hits that would cripple them? Aside from blind luck of course.

I agree that this map is ideal for him, but you have a 3 move unit chasing after 7 move flying behemoths. It is unlikely to be finished in less than 20 turns. I'm confused. Why would Owen turn on you if you raise his happiness stat? I'll have to try him out in my next playthrough and see.

Thanks for the feedback. I'm sure I got plenty wrong, but that's part of the reason of posting my thoughts. Finding out who I was wrong about. -Good to know about Izerna. Not sure where I got the idea that she needed to be promoted. She does get the injury recovery spell from promotion so I don't think my ranking changes too much. There's a decent reward for using and promoting her. - I do admit that Thaddy is the best thief. Just not sure how valuable that is for normal gameplay. Thaddy, Owen, Esteban and Derrick are the characters I've used the least, and I'm sure my lack of experience with them shows in my ranking. I forgot that Thaddy had provoke. That Provoke Evasion combo sounds pretty sweet, I'll have to try it sometime. I theoretically thought he would be good at acquiring money like most thieves, but I had mistakenly focused on the Steal skill. The fact that you can only use it 3 times per map and only before moving was a huge bummer. If he's useful for locking down enemies and getting multiple crippling strikes in, maybe he deserves another chance. I guess you are supposed to provoke enemies towards you and steal from them, but without evasion that is playing with fire. - Fair enough about Owen. Sounds like he should be B- character at the very least. The 20 turn thing is still a real downside IMO. For example, the desert map where you fight all of the wyverns is a perfect map for him. High magic resistance, can attack with any element. But due to the annoyingly random attack pattern of the wyverns it can often take more than twenty turns to kill them all. So he leaves you hanging high and dry when you need him the most. I read somewhere that if you don't raise Owen's happiness high enough and use him on map 12-1, he turns on you. Not sure how accurate that is, but that is what I meant by his uncertainty when recruiting him. Considering that happiness is an invisible stat, it is a downside, even if it is minor. - I do like Percival, but I've never had any success with consistently crippling units. I didn't know that Lightning was that good at crippling, good to know. You still have to hope the enemy survives long enough to be struck by Lightning twice (assuming lightning deals about 40% of hp), but it is one of the better methods of crippling I've seen. - Yeah, I honestly wanted to drop Marcel further, but I didn't want my bias against Armor units to influence me too strongly. He does go through L Shields rather quickly. I went through 2 of them in the snow map. I thought the Zweihander was his personal weapon, my bad. The biggest drawback to me is that his defense isn't special. He tops out at 10-11 defense like most of the heavy armor cavalry. Don't see a point in using him over Elbert or Arthur. He does have Guard, which is nice on occasion, so its not like he deserves to be too low. I could see maybe drop a tier. -Interesting. To be honest, I've had problems with promoting Adel in both directions. Depends on the playthrough. But I can't ever get him to promote. Vantage can be a broken ability if given to a powerful unit, but honestly Lance Knights are probably the worst class for it. Lances can't counterattack anyway and spears in general aren't great defensive weapons. - I do agree in a sense, but like I mentioned with Faye if a unit joins early enough, it is hard to consider them a "growth unit". At that point, they just are a unit that is slightly behind the curve. And Arthur certainly can be competent at base. And yeah, you don't have to sell me on Arthur, he's pretty amazing. - Honestly, if I were doing the list again, I'd probably swap Aegina and Sherlock. I do admit in my review that Aegina is an objectively bad unit, but at the same time she's the only one that can deal with many bosses/strong enemies in a timely manner. It is hard to give a bad grade to a unit that can accomplish goals that others cannot.

Pretty good guess. Bernstol, Bernstyle. Close enough. Who knows if Bernstol is really the official name, that is just what the fan translation decided his name was.

D tier: Esteban: He's the other Est in the game. He's supposed to have a niche in fog of war maps with his Scotopic skill, but fails at truly being useful since he lacks the Watchful skill against the many stealth enemies that are present in those scenarios. He has a really annoying permanent recruitment quest where he has to be deployed in a bunch of main missions and speak to enemy soldiers. Because of that, I've never bothered trying to recruit him permanently. From what I hear, he becomes really busted when you raise him to level 20 but I don't see the point of doing that when he starts out so lousy. His initial skillset and gear are the worst of any mercenary archer and he doesn't serve a particular niche role. The only good thing you can say about him is that he's an Archer, which is one of the better classes in the game. At the same time, there are 4 other amazing archers and arrows aren't plentiful enough to run more of them. Ruby: It is hard to rank a mounted unit as a F tier, but Ruby comes close to it. I've used her almost every single run and I've never had her turn out even close to average. The main reason why she isn't ranked as an F unit is because there are some clear benefits to using her. If you use enough and level her up she joins and you gain a paralogue chapter with some decent rewards. If by some miracle you are able to promote her, Clifford also joins permanently and that is clearly a great boon. It still kind of depresses her value because all it means is that she's getting benched for her pops, making all that effort of getting her promoted somewhat pointless. It may not be worth bothering with her in the end, but the value is something that the F tier units cannot claim to provide. And that mount and sword goes a long way in keeping her out of F tier. F tier: Saphira: As my rankings clearly show, I think priests are pretty awful in this game, so why would I want to use an Est priest? She's not even good at her job off the bat. On top of that she has story relevance, so she adds a Game Over condition. Her supposed benefits for being this lore important character really suck. She has a unique holy attack spell and that sounds great in theory, but it has an attack range of 1. Really? I'm going to throw my weak ass Priest character that is a game over condition into melee range??? And yeah she has all of the downsides of the Priest class, so good luck getting her in and out of combat. Her Silence skill becomes useful in the later stages of the game, but you'd have to deploy her in really dangerous maps to get that benefit, so its probably not worth it. The only scenario where I'd use her is if both Izerna and Owen are unavailable and even then, I just would try to make due with vulneraries. Edit: I take that back, there's one map where you can easily keep her protected and her Silence skill is very useful. I don't think one map of usefulness is enough to keep her out of F tier, but it still should be noted. Derrick: This ranking may be off because I've only used Derrick once, but I think it is warranted. He's an Armor Knight with Axes and no special skills to speak of. As I understand, he's the meme unit so this is by design. There may be some special event that you gain by using him in a bunch of maps, but I'd have to be something really special to make using him worth it.

C tier: Burroughs: He's the lone ballista unit and he can be pretty devastating in the right circumstances. His ballista bolts can deal upwards of 25+ damage in one hit with relatively decent accuracy and a max of 7 range. He can also boost his accuracy with Battle Cry and Aim. The problem with Ballista units is that they are extremely vulnerable and must be protected. They also can only move through road or plains terrain at a rate of two, so that limits the amount of maps where they can be useful. They also have a limited range in the direction they are facing, so you'll be forced to waste turns rotating the ballista if the enemy is out of range. Their ammunition is also pretty scarce, so you'll want to choose wisely when to deploy. Due to all those limitations they can never be a fundamental part of the army. I can't give a part time unit that high of a ranking. They do excel in defensive maps, so there's a clear use case. Owen: Owen is a unit that I haven't tried that much and there's a few aspects about him that I'm unclear about. This ranking may be completely off, so take it with a grain of salt. I've definitively tried to make use of his appealing skill set and have ran into some roadblocks that inform this ranking. First, the positives. Owen is another powerful pre-promote mercenary (Bishop) and he can use all Holy and Anima magic. He also starts with some advanced holy magic like Physic, Calm and Escape. He's also cheap compared to other pre-promotes. Sounds great, right? Well, now comes the downsides. His weapon rank in all anima magic starts out at 1, so he'll be lucky to hit enemies with anything other than the most basic of spells. But wait, why don't we just use him all the time and grind up his magic skills? Here comes the dagger. His combination of Priest movement plus his 20 turn limit per map means that he doesn't get the opportunity to grind up his attack magic until very late in the game. His 20 turn limit is also a real downside in a lot of maps that go longer. You'd think that 20 turns is close enough to 24 for it to not matter, but there's real pressure in the last few turns of most main chapters, especially if you are trying to hit all of the objectives/gather all of the items/kill all bosses. He's still a good healer and has his uses as a backup attack mage, but he doesn't excel enough in combat to compel me to use him over Izerna most of the time. There are a few maps where he's perfect, especially those where you want to have your units escape a few turns before the 24 turn limit, but there aren't as many as you'd think. Once Izerna gains Physic and Escape, I'm hard pressed to find a reason to drop 700gp to hire him. I'm not that clear on the requirements to recruit him permanently, but I think it can go wrong in certain scenarios. If you don't achieve his recruitment goal and continue to use him there's a huge downside. Maybe someone can clarify this aspect to me. But it sounds like another downside to me. In conclusion, he's a very appealing unit with a bunch of small downsides that add up to a big downside. I do want to force him into one of my future playthroughs but that would mean abandoning Izerna (and Dean's promotion) so I have a hard time doing that. Axel: Axel is the only Pirate unit in the game and he has a very useful niche. He's the only unit that can travel on water and there are a few maps that you can gain a huge advantage from using this ability. Plus there are many villager requests that can only be completed by using this ability. He's relatively cheap compared to other mercenaries. He's also a better Searcher than Czene so he has a little bit of added utility there. Unfortunately, he's an Axe user and his low hit rate makes him pretty rough to rely on as a combat unit. He doesn't have the skills that Dean and Daoud get. Pulverize is nice, but it does nothing to improve his low hit rates. He's also relatively easy to recruit permanently, so if you like him you'll get him. I used him extensively in my first run and he was useful but fell off hard in the end game. Kramer: Kramer is the definition of meh. He's not horrible by any means, but there are so many sword units that offer more than him. He has the ability to knock away shields, which is useful at times but is RNG reliant. He has some nice defensive abilities like Arrowbane, but he has low defense and can't equip shields so he can't be a tank. He gains a paralogue chapter if you use him enough to join permanently and he gains a sword upon promotion, but even that is underwhelming. His personal sword is nothing special. He's the definition of a C tier character. Enid: She's the first true Est archetype character you get in this game. I guess Faye can also be considered an Est of sorts, but she joins early enough to not be considered one. Anyway, Enid is a very extreme version of an Est. She is almost useless in her unpromoted form. Has no special skills of note that improve her combat, is locked to swords, no mount and has a low starting sword rank. On top of that, she has low hp and defense. So keeping her alive long enough to level her up is a chore, even if she does have Paragon. Her promotion is amazing though. She becomes the best mage in the game and gains a unique spell that is better than Aegina's, plus the Focus skill. But her promotion requirement is a pain and you aren't guaranteed to reach it even at a high level. You may dump a bunch of levels into Enid without any payoff. I don't want to discount a unit that has a S tier upper range, but the floor is very low. Thaddy: Thaddy is the best thief in the game. Unfortunately, that is like being the tallest short person (no disrespect meant to short people). And Czene can do the job well enough to save you the 5,000 gold required to permanently recruit him. It is possible that there's some special event when you recruit him that makes him amazing but I have no knowledge of that. The way the Steal skill works in Berwick reduces Thaddy's appeal even more. If Czene dies, he becomes necessary for a few missions but as long as Czene exists, the right strategy is to save your money for horses or weapons. Money is at a premium in this game and we can't be spending it on thieves.

Yeah, the movement thing is something I didn't take into consideration. Heavy Knight movement sucks in most terrain types. I do think Sherlock is good, but he is very dependent on good gear and arrows early on. I didn't feel like Sylvis and Christine were that limited by gear choices because of their ability to use Aim. And Brave Crossbows are plentiful but brave bows are not, so his damage potential is rather limited. I do agree that I may be overrating Sylvis. Mounts are that good.