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Fire Emblem Three Houses Unit Tier Lists


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So about that bow accuracy/range discussion that pops up from time to time, I can now safely say it's not relevant AT ALL.

I have 2 Bow Knights (Leonie and Shamir), they both went by Sniper to get there, though Leonie had some time as a Pegasus. Shamir has very high Dexterity, Leonie has average. Neither of them has mastered Archer, so no Hit+20.

I've been hitting for easily more than 80% hitrate on every enemy even with steel and silver bows, the few times where it drops to 60-70 I just switch to Iron and hit almost 100%, if even that isn't enough (like against some bosses, eg. the one in Edelgard's route chapter 14) Curved Shot is more than enough to grant a good hit, which lays down the way for some other unit to move in.

Against regular units they don't just pack high power (mostly killing in one or two round even Warriors and Paladins), but they have incredible utility, able to reach for flyers that stay in non accessible tiles or just assassinate enemy Snipers that can't respond. And, very relevant later on, they're the only thing that can safely face opposing Bow Knights, which otherwise screw you over, especially in groups.

tl;dr: don't worry, make everyone a bow knight, if they have even average Dex they'll kill everything before the enemy even knows what hit them (since it's too far, lol).

 

3 minutes ago, Shadow Mir said:

:facepalm:
Did you not read what trouble his proficiency in axes and brawling causes for him? Either he has to risk whiffing and eating a double attack, which sucks, or he hits like a wet noodle, which also sucks.

I'd say if your Raphael can't take hits he probably got RNG screwed, because he should definitely be able to take double attacks without a problem. As for hitting back, can't talk about gauntlets as I haven't used them, but with an Axe you're surely getting a solid response, if not for being quite inaccurate. But even then, who cares, Raphael exists to lure in enemies in range of your other units or to block up chokepoints, doesn't really matter if he misses.

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Just now, Shadow Mir said:

:facepalm:
Did you not read what trouble his proficiency in axes and brawling gets him? Either he has to risk whiffing and eating a double attack, which sucks, or he hits like a wet noodle, which also sucks.

You don't miss with fists; they're accurate.
Hell, without the weapon triangle, even axes can be hard to miss with.
Can forge weapons too on the cheap for more accuracy (and Mt if it's not a gauntlet). And you should because money rains in this game.
If he's hitting like a wet noodle despite all he can gain just from class abilities alone, you must have been severely RNG-screwed, but everyone can turn out horrible through awful RNG.
Average RNG? Nah, he'll be fine.

Also, didn't mention it before I edited, but enemies do swap to Steel. This helps him a lot more than other characters until the swap to Silver.
And with the swap to Silver, you start meeting Assassins.

You do not out-speed Assassins; they out-speed you.

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1 hour ago, Technoweirdo said:

You don't miss with fists; they're accurate.
Hell, without the weapon triangle, even axes can be hard to miss with.
Can forge weapons too on the cheap for more accuracy (and Mt if it's not a gauntlet). And you should because money rains in this game.
If he's hitting like a wet noodle despite all he can gain just from class abilities alone, you must have been severely RNG-screwed, but everyone can turn out horrible through awful RNG.
Average RNG? Nah, he'll be fine.

Also, didn't mention it before I edited, but enemies do swap to Steel. This helps him a lot more than other characters until the swap to Silver.
And with the swap to Silver, you start meeting Assassins.

You do not out-speed Assassins; they out-speed you.

I was referring to axes, which are both inaccurate and heavy. Using those is liable to get him doubled. Regarding forges, everyone benefits from a forged weapon, so I don't see that as much of a positive for him. As for hitting like a wet noodle, it's called gauntlets. High strength doesn't help much when your weapon of choice has piss poor might (and for that matter, neither does the brave effect).

Edited by Shadow Mir
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4 minutes ago, Shadow Mir said:

I was referring to axes, which are both inaccurate and heavy. Using those is liable to get him doubled. Regarding forges, everyone benefits from a forged weapon, so I don't see that as much of a positive for him. As for hitting like a wet noodle, it's called gauntlets. High strength doesn't help much when your weapon of choice has piss poor might (and for that matter, neither does the brave effect).

The thing is, you shouldn't care at all about being doubled (and thus equipping a heavy axe is not an issue), because he takes half the damage of everyone else even if he gets doubled. That's the whole purpose of Raphael as a unit, just tank stuff. If yours doesn't tank well, then it probably got screwed on stats, and if your question is "how do I use him" the answer is the same as for every other RNG screwed character in this game series.

And I'm saying this because there's quite a bit of people who said that Raphael has been a good unit, I had a early Golden Deer run and I can confirm the same, he's not top tier, but he does his job well. Obviously Hilda is a generally better Axe user (not as tanky), but then again Claude is just a better archer than Ignatz, Lysithea is a better mage than Marianne, Leonie is a better Cavalier than Lorenz, so what do you do, bench half your party?

I fail to see the issue, really. Either bench him or babysit him to try and get him up to speed, not many alternatives.

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I don't really want to make an account to post here and im sure there will be many people who disagree with me but Three houses is really well balanced which results in units be ranked on how easy it is to use them. As a result I personally believe that Cyrill, Bernedetta, Ignatz and Ashe are the worst students. Cyrill joins with too low bases, he has a good set of skills and pretty good growths but lack of personal skill damages him. Im tying Bernedetta, Ignatz and Ashe they all have steep competition with Shamir who will join regardless of house who has much higher stats, a great personal skill that makes her an amazing dance bait and is only lacking one skill to become a bow knight. I know it's a pitfall not to use mutiple units of the same class but all three of the archers have lacking growths Ignatz horrible strength, Bernedetta has horrible base speed making her easy to be speed screwed and Ashe having a horrible skill set as well as a worthless personal skill. Claude and Leonie (Who is also one of the easiest characters to recruit) both make great bow units as well so at the very least you will have two bow knights.

 

Caspar and Rapheal are also low tier. Caspar has the horrible fate of having bad authority so it will take him a while to get good battalions also both Gauntlets and Axes are horrible weapon types, many of the strongest enemies will use swords so lance breaker is not too effective. War master is however a strong class but their low move might damage them. Rapheal is a step above Caspar, his good armor growth will let him nab weight -3 to be more effective with axes earlier.

 

Byleth, all three lords and Mercedes are all the best units in the game. Byleth and the three lords thanks to their abilites will snowball at an insane rate reaching a high level early, all three of them can easily OHKO enemies into the endgame. Mercedes is the best healer in the game, Live to serve is so much more useful then the other house's healers personals, Linhardt's is worthless he will never wait and Marianne similar will likely be far away from other units as healers are often stride bots too. Thanks to being able to heal anywhere on the map for lots of health with pyschic and her insane resistance she can become the best mage killer in the game, she also becomes a glass cannon (Not on the level of Lysithea) and will likely even outdo Annette the blue lions mage in terms of damage. Healers are also universally needed I would recommend running two, her only negative is having really dumb recruitment requirements so gifts are really needed. Also in terms of healers Linhardt is the worst (But just by being a healer boosts him a lot) thanks to useless personal skill and lack of Gremory access, Marianne having Silence and skills for holy knight is actually really good but I would still say Mercedes is better at the end of the day it's utility (Marianne) vs stats (Mercedes).

 

I feel like it'll take too long for me to go through everyone but maybe i'll return and post more of my thoughts or maybe im just wrong.

Edited by you_equipped_socks
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For the most part I agree with your analysis, however in terms of the main healers: Linhardt gets Warp and the other two do not. I feel this easily balances out the fact that he doesn't have access to the Gremory class, the utility of Warp is hard to overstate. There are only two other units who do get Warp - Lysithea and Manuela - and neither of them get Physic, so they function poorly as a main healer. Obviously Lysithea having Warp is great, but you want her on the offensive and she's not going to replace a proper healer.

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6 minutes ago, you_equipped_socks said:

Byleth, all three lords and Mercedes are all the best units in the game. Byleth and the three lords thanks to their abilites will snowball at an insane rate reaching a high level early, all three of them can easily OHKO enemies into the endgame. Mercedes is the best healer in the game, Live to serve is so much more useful then the other house's healers personals, Linhardt's is worthless he will never wait and Marianne similar will likely be far away from other units as healers are often stride bots too. Thanks to being able to heal anywhere on the map for lots of health with pyschic and her insane resistance she can become the best mage killer in the game, she also becomes a glass cannon (Not on the level of Lysithea) and will likely even outdo Annette the blue lions mage in terms of damage. Healers are also universally needed I would recommend running two, her only negative is having really dumb recruitment requirements so gifts are really needed. Also in terms of healers Linhardt is the worst (But just by being a healer boosts him a lot) thanks to useless personal skill and lack of Gremory access, Marianne having Silence and skills for holy knight is actually really good but I would still say Mercedes is better at the end of the day it's utility (Marianne) vs stats (Mercedes).

While you're obviously correct in that live to serve is easily the best passive of the three white mages, I don't think it's that big of a deal. If you're using them as a pure white mage that just heals every turn, they shouldn't be taking damage in the first place. If you let them take damage and need them to kill something, they all learn Nosferatu for self healing. In my BL run, I think her passive actually helped her maybe 2~3 times in the entire run. So then if you're going to say one's better than the other you have to start looking at their spell lists. Fortify is clearly amazing, but I'm not willing to say it is strictly better than Warp(Linhardt). Especially when Flayn gets Fortify and she auto joins. Only other way to get warp is to use Manuela with her 35% magic growth, or recruit Lys, which while not hard, is harder than Flayn.

Marianne on the other hand is in this weird in between area where she gets silence (I'd rather have Warp or Fortify), but then gets Thoron, Fimbulvetr, and Aura. Marianne is closer to Dorothea than the white mages, honestly. She doesn't even get Restore.

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Just finished my BE playthrough (Edelgard's route) where I only used Teach + BE students.

For the Battles/Victories stats they were all pretty close to each other (93 to 114 victories) except Linhardt at 63.

If I had to rank them from how they performed throughout the game :

1 - Edelgard (Brigand->Warrior->unique->unique) Hits like a truck but wasn't really that tanky.
2 - Byleth (Pegasus Knight->Falcon Knight) Good mix defenses, very good speed/dex/strengh. (Still tends to gain a lot less Spd than Dex even though I had more % in Spd, oh well)
3 - Hubert (Mage->Warlock->Dark Knight) That dude carried the second half like a boss especially the last few maps.
4 - Caspar (Brigand->Grappler->War Master) Choose any target, send in Caspar, target dead. A little less tanky than Edelgard, but more crits/avoid.
5(tie) - Dorothea (Mage->Warlock->Gremori) Gets the job well done, magic is strong in this route.
5(tie) - Ferdinand (Cavalier->Paladin) Wasn't lucky at all in Str, in the first 20 lvl he gained 5 points...still the rest was above decent (Spd especially even though he was Cav/Pal). As Tanky as Caspar just less punch.
7 - Petra (Thief->Assassin) Okay I don't really know what happened, she was strong before timeskip and then poof...she can double anything...except she can't kill anything.
8 - Linhardt (Priest->Bishop->Dark Knight) HEALING! (Useful in the last few maps too because so many high Def/low Res targets)
9 - Bernadetta (Archer->Sniper-Bow Knight) Firing wet noodles isn't very fun, useful for the very few Flyers you fight in this route (almost none except one chapter and one paralogue).

So yeah.

I think based on the route some students will perform a lot better because there is not the same types of enemies.
 

Edit : And I think apart from Byleth, I got screwed on a lot of them, I had a lot (and I really mean a lot) of 2-3 stats level up where it was almost always HP + Luck/Res/Cha...The best level ups I got were during the last map and I was pretty amazed to see them.

Edited by Tharne
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40 minutes ago, Burklight said:

While you're obviously correct in that live to serve is easily the best passive of the three white mages, I don't think it's that big of a deal. If you're using them as a pure white mage that just heals every turn, they shouldn't be taking damage in the first place. If you let them take damage and need them to kill something, they all learn Nosferatu for self healing. In my BL run, I think her passive actually helped her maybe 2~3 times in the entire run. So then if you're going to say one's better than the other you have to start looking at their spell lists. Fortify is clearly amazing, but I'm not willing to say it is strictly better than Warp(Linhardt). Especially when Flayn gets Fortify and she auto joins. Only other way to get warp is to use Manuela with her 35% magic growth, or recruit Lys, which while not hard, is harder than Flayn.

Marianne on the other hand is in this weird in between area where she gets silence (I'd rather have Warp or Fortify), but then gets Thoron, Fimbulvetr, and Aura. Marianne is closer to Dorothea than the white mages, honestly. She doesn't even get Restore.

True I guess I did undervalue Lin's warp a bit, Mariannes reason is not a strength but if your willing to invest a bit more time I guess it can become worthwhile. I even admitelly forgot about Flayn a bit. She joins chapter 7 if I remember right(?) I'd argue at that point whichever healer you have used has had enough time to master monk so they have magic+2 and drawback, in terms of avaibility flayn will always struggle compare to your primary white mage. It's a small thing to also mention but Mercedes will end with Gremory compared to Linhardts Bishop so she will always have one more move then him. I personally find fortify better then warp as Stride will effectively get your whole team to places a single unit could have been warped to (In most cases) however I can 100% see your reasoning as to why warp might be more important, I might actually need to start using it on my next run. I have changed my mind however on the top of my personal tier list I would say whoever is your primary healer is also top tier.

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3 hours ago, timon said:

So about that bow accuracy/range discussion that pops up from time to time, I can now safely say it's not relevant AT ALL.

I have 2 Bow Knights (Leonie and Shamir), they both went by Sniper to get there, though Leonie had some time as a Pegasus. Shamir has very high Dexterity, Leonie has average. Neither of them has mastered Archer, so no Hit+20.

I've been hitting for easily more than 80% hitrate on every enemy even with steel and silver bows, the few times where it drops to 60-70 I just switch to Iron and hit almost 100%, if even that isn't enough (like against some bosses, eg. the one in Edelgard's route chapter 14) Curved Shot is more than enough to grant a good hit, which lays down the way for some other unit to move in.

Against regular units they don't just pack high power (mostly killing in one or two round even Warriors and Paladins), but they have incredible utility, able to reach for flyers that stay in non accessible tiles or just assassinate enemy Snipers that can't respond. And, very relevant later on, they're the only thing that can safely face opposing Bow Knights, which otherwise screw you over, especially in groups.

tl;dr: don't worry, make everyone a bow knight, if they have even average Dex they'll kill everything before the enemy even knows what hit them (since it's too far, lol).

Fair enough, I guess. That being said, Bernadetta and Ashe do get Deadeye, which my range complaint was fixated on - attacking from 5 range was a better idea in Shadows of Valentia, and bow units in that game had their fair share of baggage.

1 hour ago, timon said:

The thing is, you shouldn't care at all about being doubled (and thus equipping a heavy axe is not an issue), because he takes half the damage of everyone else even if he gets doubled. That's the whole purpose of Raphael as a unit, just tank stuff. If yours doesn't tank well, then it probably got screwed on stats, and if your question is "how do I use him" the answer is the same as for every other RNG screwed character in this game series.

And I'm saying this because there's quite a bit of people who said that Raphael has been a good unit, I had a early Golden Deer run and I can confirm the same, he's not top tier, but he does his job well. Obviously Hilda is a generally better Axe user (not as tanky), but then again Claude is just a better archer than Ignatz, Lysithea is a better mage than Marianne, Leonie is a better Cavalier than Lorenz, so what do you do, bench half your party?

I fail to see the issue, really. Either bench him or babysit him to try and get him up to speed, not many alternatives.

I don't see being outclassed as a reason to bench a unit on its own. But when a unit gets outstripped at what you're supposed to do by at least three other units I'm using, like Raphael is, I start to find that unit's place on the team questionable...

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19 minutes ago, you_equipped_socks said:

True I guess I did undervalue Lin's warp a bit, Mariannes reason is not a strength but if your willing to invest a bit more time I guess it can become worthwhile. I even admitelly forgot about Flayn a bit. She joins chapter 7 if I remember right(?) I'd argue at that point whichever healer you have used has had enough time to master monk so they have magic+2 and drawback, in terms of avaibility flayn will always struggle compare to your primary white mage. It's a small thing to also mention but Mercedes will end with Gremory compared to Linhardts Bishop so she will always have one more move then him. I personally find fortify better then warp as Stride will effectively get your whole team to places a single unit could have been warped to (In most cases) however I can 100% see your reasoning as to why warp might be more important, I might actually need to start using it on my next run. I have changed my mind however on the top of my personal tier list I would say whoever is your primary healer is also top tier.

The more I think about this, the more I'm starting to think that tiering white mages doesn't mean anything. Regardless of what route you're on, you want Fortify, Warp, and Restore. None of them offer all of those things, so you basically need to mix and match to some extent to get all three. If you go BE, Flayn covers what Lind is missing. If you go BL, you probably want to recruit Lys as faith is easier to get than reason(Lys and Lind both need magic, but Lind wants Reason), plus she's a better warper than Lind is anyway. GD is weird because Marianne doesn't actually have any of listed spells. She's good to have around because she has the best damaging spells of the three plus Physic, but in this case you don't have to recruit Lys for warping, and Flayn covers restore and fortify. Flayn also gets rescue which can be nice sometimes.

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3 minutes ago, Burklight said:

If you go BE, Flayn covers what Lind is missing.

Flayn lacks availability on one of the BE routes, though, so you'd probably need someone else for Restore/Fortify. 

 

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1 minute ago, 0 Def Cleric said:

Flayn lacks availability on one of the BE routes, though, so you'd probably need someone else for Restore/Fortify. 

 

Derp, forgot about that. I went church in my BE run so I guess it slipped my mind. Lind gets Restore tho, so you just need Fortify. Guess that means Mercedes is a priority recruit for BE Edelgard route?

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1 minute ago, Burklight said:

Derp, forgot about that. I went church in my BE run so I guess it slipped my mind. Lind gets Restore tho, so you just need Fortify. Guess that means Mercedes is a priority recruit for BE Edelgard route?

Yep. Recruiting her also makes an extremely difficult later map easier, since she gets replaced with a generic Bishop there. Extra bonus. 

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If im being entirely honest I don't think tiers matter for hard mode. This is one of the easiest fire emblem games and because it's well balanced every character is usable, I think we should wait untill Lunatic and the 5th route DLC (If we are getting it) to truly see the value of all units.

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Since all mages can heal and attack, I prefer to use a heal by committee approach. Dancer/Mage/Healer + Mage/Healer + Mage/Healer. 

Unfortunately, no one has both warp and fortify. I like to have at least 2 physics, and I chose 2 warps over 1 warp and 1 fortify. 

I used:

Dorothea (Dancer, Physic), Linhardt (Warp, Physic), Lysithea (Warp, Seraphim). 

I think tier-wise, they've balanced the spells well. I think Warp/Physic makes Linhardt a notch above considering the slight redundancy between Physic/Fortify that Mercedes has (or better utility than Physic, Silence for Marianne). 

They all have terrible speed and good Res. Linhardt has the worst Mag stat of the 3, though.

Like I said, I think they're pretty well balanced.

 

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52 minutes ago, Shadow Mir said:

I don't see being outclassed as a reason to bench a unit on its own. But when a unit gets outstripped at what you're supposed to do by at least three other units I'm using, like Raphael is, I start to find that unit's place on the team questionable...

It's totally fair to say, "My Raphael isn't cutting it compared to my other units." 

However, numerous people on here have suggested that he has proven to be highly valuable with either axes or gauntlets because (a) he either negates the weight of axes with Heavy Armor Skills + his high Strength (at 25 strength with Heavy Armor C, he's only losing 4 speed from a steel axe), (b) he kills things easily with double gauntlet attacks, because his strength is so high (especially in attack phase with Death Blow).  Additionally, he'll get make-up points by classing into Grappler/War Master, both of which have +10% speed growth.  

He and Dedue are virtually identical, but Dedue has far more competition within his house:  Dimitri, Felix, and Sylvain all have 45+ strength growth with 50+ speed.  Only Hilda matches that in GD.  There haven't been many complaints about Dedue's usefulness.

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27 minutes ago, freewaffles said:

It's totally fair to say, "My Raphael isn't cutting it compared to my other units." 

However, numerous people on here have suggested that he has proven to be highly valuable with either axes or gauntlets because (a) he either negates the weight of axes with Heavy Armor Skills + his high Strength (at 25 strength with Heavy Armor C, he's only losing 4 speed from a steel axe), (b) he kills things easily with double gauntlet attacks, because his strength is so high (especially in attack phase with Death Blow).  Additionally, he'll get make-up points by classing into Grappler/War Master, both of which have +10% speed growth.  

He and Dedue are virtually identical, but Dedue has far more competition within his house:  Dimitri, Felix, and Sylvain all have 45+ strength growth with 50+ speed.  Only Hilda matches that in GD.  There haven't been many complaints about Dedue's usefulness.

You're completely missing the point. I'm hard pressed to find a role for Raphael because far more often than not, Byleth, Leonie or Hilda can do it better due to not having glaring weaknesses he suffers from, which is made worse by his lacking redeeming features. He reminds me waaaaay too much of GBA fighters for my liking, and we all know how bad they were... And it does NOT help his already flimsy case that he struggles compared to those three early on. If he's struggling early on, I consider that a harbinger that he's only going to drag me down...

Edited by Shadow Mir
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2 minutes ago, Shadow Mir said:

You're completely missing the point. I'm hard pressed to find a role for Raphael because far more often than not, Byleth, Leonie or Hilda can do it better due to not having glaring weaknesses he suffers from, which is made worse by his lacking redeeming features. He reminds me waaaaay too much of GBA fighters for my liking, and we all know how bad they were... And it does NOT help his already flimsy case that he struggles compared to those three early on.

Well, for starters, only one of the three you mention can become a War Master, which automatically means he fills a niche that they can't. You're also definitively getting stat screwed if he reminds you of GBA fighters, since he has some of the highest defense in the game, as opposed to them. Really, if you want to compare him to an unfavorable GBA class, compare him to Knights. And he's still a good bit better than most of them, since he has gauntlet access, which the poor might of is offset by his high strength, as opposed to units like Leonie, who will suffer if you toss gauntlets on them. 

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I'm going to chime in and say that Raphael is pretty bad statistically. Anecdotal evidence is meaningless when talking about character ranking, so I'm only going to use pure numbers here.

Now what are Raphael's downsides? Well his most obvious one is that he is incredibly, incredibly slow. His speed growth is 15, which is horrendous. As in his growths usually won't even keep up with class bases. Assuming you follow a route to War Master (which people seem to be advocating), he only has on average 18 speed at level 30 (his average speed by then is actually LESS than that, and is only bumped up because 16+2 is the minimum speed a War Master can possibly have).

What does this mean? Well it means that he has trouble double attacking even moderate speed enemies. And in this game, most of the time if you do not double an enemy you have no hope of ORKOing them. (There are some exceptions, but for the most part this is true.)Now how can we fix this problem? You can use gauntlets on player phase to help him get KOs. But gauntlets suck as a weapon type. They have good player phase early on, which is a niche, but they come with the drawback of being literal garbage on enemy phase due to their low might, which is bad. And later on a strong but slow unit with gauntlets is outclassed by a faster and slightly weaker unit with a brave weapon. So overall gauntlets just fall off hard later on.

This means that Raphael is likely killing one enemy on each player phase and weakening a few more on enemy phase. Which is fine but significantly worse than what better units can contribute, as all of the better units can kill one enemy on player phase and then kill whoever attacks them on enemy phase as well.

-------------------------------------------

In addition, a common misconception is that Raphael has very high strength. He doesn't really. His strength growth is 50, which is only slightly above average (for reference, the average strength growth among physical units is roughly 45, obviously mages have much worse strength). His base strength of 11 is definitely good, but his numbers aren't enough to put him significantly ahead in strength on average compared to another unit in the same classes as him (since classes do of course affect growth rates). Having a few less points of strength and being able to double matters a lot more than having a few more points of strength and being incapable of doubling all but the slowest enemies.

The primary tradeoff for his horrendous speed growth isn't strength, but is actually his HP and Def growths. But it's much better to have a unit that can fight 2-3 enemies on enemy phase and kill them all, rather than one that fights 4-5 enemies on the enemy phase but kills none of them.

 

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16 minutes ago, 0 Def Cleric said:

Well, for starters, only one of the three you mention can become a War Master, which automatically means he fills a niche that they can't. You're also definitively getting stat screwed if he reminds you of GBA fighters, since he has some of the highest defense in the game, as opposed to them. Really, if you want to compare him to an unfavorable GBA class, compare him to Knights. And he's still a good bit better than most of them, since he has gauntlet access, which the poor might of is offset by his high strength, as opposed to units like Leonie, who will suffer if you toss gauntlets on them. 

It's a huge pitfall to assume that just because someone has access to a class means that they serve a important niche. You're assuming you need to have a diverse class spread, but you really don't. If Paladin is the best class at killing things (as it is in most FE games) then having more Paladins instead of a Fighter or whatever is a good thing, not a bad thing.

The War Master has no significant niche. The purpose of most physical combat units is to kill enemies. A secondary objective is to be able to take his reasonably well, because that lets you fight on enemy phase and therefore kill more enemies per turn cycle. The War Master doesn't do anything particularly special beyond this, and you can exchange it with any other class that serves a similar purpose.

Do you know what else does the same thing as War Master? Wyvern Lord. Except Wyvern Lord is significantly faster and has better defense. Also it has 8 movement and canto and ignores terrain penalties.

Not having access to War Master is not a significant drawback for physical units, because there is the option of a better class instead. It's like saying that Lysithea is worse off because she doesn't have access to Dark Mage. That's really not true, because Dark Mage as a class is heavily outclassed by Mage. She doesn't miss it at all.

Edited by Silly
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4 minutes ago, Silly said:

-snip-

I mean, you kind of miss the gauntletfaire on War Master more in this game than you would in other games, considering Demonic Beast combat is mostly player phase, and there are quite a lot of those to face. This game isn't as enemy phase heavy as the 3ds games, Genealogy, or even the GBA games due to that. 

We're not discussing whether Raphael is the Seth of this game, we're discussing whether he's usable. Which, frankly, he is, at least on Golden Deer route. Assuming efficiency, you want Byleth to go into one of the two best classes in the game as fast as possible, with perhaps some skill training to pick up white magic (recover/warp/fortify) that you don't have on your team. Neither of the two best classes in the game (falcon knight and wyvern lord, with the first outpacing the second) are ideal for recruiting Raphael's competitors (in regards to super-high strength and axe talent). Caspar wants Brawling, Ferdinand wants Heavy Armor, and Petra wants Riding (which is the easiest of the three to obtain, but will likely never see the light of day if you're F!Byleth.) His only efficient competitor is Sylvain, and only as F!Byleth. Therefore, he at least has some utility besides being a joke character. (Monster Crusher is nice too.)

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32 minutes ago, 0 Def Cleric said:

Well, for starters, only one of the three you mention can become a War Master, which automatically means he fills a niche that they can't. You're also definitively getting stat screwed if he reminds you of GBA fighters, since he has some of the highest defense in the game, as opposed to them. Really, if you want to compare him to an unfavorable GBA class, compare him to Knights. And he's still a good bit better than most of them, since he has gauntlet access, which the poor might of is offset by his high strength, as opposed to units like Leonie, who will suffer if you toss gauntlets on them. 

And why should I care about War Master? Because I don't feel like I'd be missing out on much if I went without one. It doesn't help that gauntlets are complete garbage on enemy phase.

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Just now, Shadow Mir said:

And why should I care about War Master? Because I don't feel like I'd be missing out on much if I went without one. It doesn't help that gauntlets are complete garbage on enemy phase.

Except they're not, due to their low weight. 

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2 minutes ago, 0 Def Cleric said:

Except they're not, due to their low weight. 

Iron Gauntlets+ on enemy phase:

1 mt, 3 weight, 95 hit, 5 crit.

Training Sword+ on enemy phase:

3 mt, 2 weight, 100 hit, 0 crit.

---------------------------------------------------

Silver Gauntlets+ on enemy phase:

4 mt, 7 weight, 90 hit, 5 crit.

Iron Sword+ on enemy phase:

6 mt, 5 weight, 100 hit, 0 crit.

 

Keep explaining to me how gauntlets are good on enemy phase.

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