Shadow Mir

Are you thinking of getting it? Might think that gauntlets aren't that great in 3H.

Pray tell, what exactly triggers that? Anyway, I agree with the general sentiment that Seteth and Flayjn's paralogue is easy, considering the most dangerous enemies are gimped by the beach.

I agree with Roy promoting earlier, but the other two sound like wishful thinking, especially the former.

Does battalion endurance get restored after the time skip? I know that whatever weapons your units have are brought back to full durability then, but never saw anything on battalion endurance.

Personally, I think it's not that good an idea. It's too heavy and too inaccurate.

Two words: Ambidextrous sprites. Far as I know, Chrom is about the only instance where it's subverted.

Sure, except they're weak, heavy, and inaccurate, aka not worth it. And he's already slow as molasses to begin with, so that's not much help. Except these brave weapons have laughable might. That might have been good in the GBA games because enemies are weak in those games (except for FE6), but in the context of 3 Houses, I'm not impressed. If I'm starting in GD, I also have Leonie, who's also much better than he is. Between her, Hilda, and Byleth, is it any wonder that I see Raphael as a lost cause? Sure, he might stop sucking once he gets to War Master, but if he needs to make it to a Master tier class to not suck, that is a Texas sized red flag. And then he gets eviscerated in return unless someone else weakened them for him. Of course, considering that you need to weaken enemies first because they hit so hard, why should I give those kills to Raphael instead of someone else who actually has prospects of being usable in Maddening?? Unfortunately, he's not even that much more durable than Hilda is starting out (woohoo, 1 more HP and defense!). And I'm not sure his growths are going to enable him to get to a point where he actually has a meaningful defensive advantage over her ever, especially since his having the lowest speed growth at 15 ensures he gets doubled all the time. You can't recruit Cyril until around chapter 5 (assuming you're not aligned with the Black Eagles), so that point is moot.

To be fair, with gauntlets being as weak as they are, mages would probably be doing no damage or next to it.

That 3 base is hardly the only issue he has. It's also the fact that he doesn't get any speed upon promoting to Warrior, meaning he has to rely entirely on his okay-but-not-great speed growth.

High strength alone does not a good unit make. Just look at the GBA fighters, who Raphael reminds me of. They were much the same - high strength and little else. Needless to say, it didn't take them far. So why should I believe that Raphael doesn't suck??? Because as things are, I'm MUCH better off recruiting a superior unit (read: literally anyone else) and using them instead of continuing to invest in an experience black hole. Oh, and this is assuming that I started with the Golden Deer in the first place; otherwise, why should I go out of my way to recruit him??? Besides that, gauntlets' poor enemy phase, range lock, and general lack of flexibility are just too bad for me to ignore.

That's what I think too. It doesn't help his case that he's an infantry unit in a Horse Emblem game.

Hard to say on Ignatz. But I can safely say that Gonzales is mostly considered bad.

That's very generous - and far from correct. Three Houses has Raphael, Fates has Nyx, Arthur, Rinkah, and others.

1) Durable enemies, effective damage is only 2x might, and the first map where archers can do effective damage, you have other sources (namely, Laguzslayers, as you get one from an info conversation and can potentially steal another from the boss). It doesn't help that longbows are pathetic. And this is on top of awful stats and availability. 2) Too bad that by then, you probably killed everything but the boss and the units near him (who are all out of range).

I have to agree with the other two guys - he's too much input for not enough output. It doesn't help that this game is arguably the most unkind to archers. Nor does it that he joins when the game is 1/3 over, and has to hope to kill enemies that are rather durable. Also, ballistae are useless in this game because they tend to be pointed at you anyway, meaning that even if you do disable them by killing the operator, you probably also already killed whatever enemies you would've hoped to attack with it.