Fire Emblem Three Houses Unit Tier Lists

[AwakeningFates]

1 hour ago, Shoblongoo said:

I'll vouch for investing in Felix's hidden talent to make him a swordsman mage + build into the Mortal Savant class being really, really good.

 

I'll second this. I made him a mortal savant on my first playthrough and wasn't disappointed. The -10 speed growth didn't hurt him that much, he still barely got hit. The magic helped him take on armoured units which was useful as he was one of my front line units. 

[Silly]

57 minutes ago, Stroud said:

You actually have to place your dodgetank between 2-3 Gambit users to be really in danger. Gambits only reduce your Avo by 10%. If you really get hit after that again your luck must be abyssal. A dodgetank done dodgetank right, anything outside of gambits should still hit you  with 0%.

But 0% is still RNG for some I guess. At the Point a Unit has Alert stance+ and build right it should be that way.

Calcs:
A Dodgetank over Lv 30 should have at least 30-35 Base Value Avo.
+ 20 Sword Avo
+20 Sword LV5
+30 Alert Stance
+10 Evasion Ring
+20 Battaion
+10 Avo (class)
We assume even Ferdinand has been hit and his personal skill is not active. He might have enough bulk to get 0 Damage out of gambit though. 
So technically its 140 Avo. Almost no enemy in the entire game has over 140 Hit. Only some Bosses. Most enemies only have between 90-120 Hit. 
That is still 126 Avo with reducing them from the Gambit. And this is assuming we have 30 Base, we can increase it more.

Outside of Sword Avo I don't see any of that we have to get with a roundabout way. We all love fliers and we invest into fliers anyway.

And we still don't have included any Tiles which raises Avo. In the woods that character would still have over 150 Avo which is certain 0%. 

No once says that it cannot change with Lunatic. In lunatic it can be less viable if they increase the hit rate of enemies or give Gambit to all enemies. But as of now Dodgetank works just fine. And you really have to play on autobot to mess it up, which you also could with any other build. Maybe on Auto battle the Dodgetank is the only one who survives.

If its not your playstyle its alright and if you find it lame this is also alright. I can only do so much and come with numbers here. And you should have an idea what kind of Hit rate the enemies will have...

Just going to point out that this is highly unrealistic.

Sword Avo means giving up your dancer, which is one of the better units in an efficient run. I would assume this does not exist.

Sword level 5 means you're using a subpar weapon type (and is also not on the direct path to any flying class). I would expect +15 avoid at most from here (Bow or Lance Prowess) or +10 on Wyverns (Axe Prowess).

The +20 avoid battalions are incompatible with fliers. I believe the highest avoid you can get on a flying battalion is +15, and that is locked to the GD route. With the other two routes (or if you have a second dodgetank on GD) you can only get up to +10.

Also, the avoid rate on rattled units definitely goes down by more than 10. I think on my runs enemy hit rates were roughly ~20 higher when my units were rattled. But I didn't test this extensively.

After trying it, dodgetanking is fine imo. It's perfectly acceptable to do on 1-2 units per run and will usually make them unkillable. The numbers are more shaky than you make them seem though. It's certainly not 0% chance of getting hit ever regardless of positioning.

Edited August 20, 2019 by Silly

[leesangstar10]

17 hours ago, magnetic_cactus said:

and I still don't see a lot of discussion regarding Swift Strikes and Point-Blank Volley (although it is starting to show up).

I have been pushing swift strike so much but people think it is too late game. Personally I think the art is broken and the reason why I rate Sylvain, Ferdinand, Seteth higher than most people.

[leesangstar10]

38 minutes ago, AwakeningFates said:

I'll second this. I made him a mortal savant on my first playthrough and wasn't disappointed. The -10 speed growth didn't hurt him that much, he still barely got hit. The magic helped him take on armoured units which was useful as he was one of my front line units. 

Mortal savant is still very much inferior to his bow knight class, which is the arguably the second best class. Bow knight does require more investment, but still he becomes much better later on.

[Silly]

9 minutes ago, leesangstar10 said:

I have been pushing swift strike so much but people think it is too late game. Personally I think the art is broken and the reason why I rate Sylvain, Ferdinand, Seteth higher than most people.

I don't think that skill is very good. It's helpful but very unnecessary.

It requires Lance A, which is a non-negligible investment given that the "optimal" class for all three of those units is Wyvern, which only needs Lance C. That extra tutoring could be put into something like authority instead. It also requires you to actually use a lance, which means you instantly lose out on ~6 attack (due to no axefaire and the difference in might between lances and axes).

Swift Strike is only active on player phase. It does not improve enemy phase combat at all. Player phase combat already has significantly easier thresholds to meet compared with enemy phase combat, since you have access to other combat arts, Death Blow, and Brave weaponry.

Overall I just think that skill doesn't really make that much of a difference. It's nice to have and might be situationally useful, but its impact on the overall viability of the unit is not significant enough for me to change my opinion of the character significantly.

Edited August 20, 2019 by Silly

[leesangstar10]

3 hours ago, Garlyle said:

Annette - She is a weird unit when it comes to proficiencies. Annette prefers Reason, Authority and... Axes. Annette can be a really powerful mage, and with C axes she can also unlock Lightning Axe - a very powerful combat art that could one shot enemies, even when she has just a Training Axe. She can get later the Crusher, which has a great combat art with it for her. Unfortunately she's a very squishy unit, and she might have a hard time surviving her own paralogue.

Sorry but gotta disagree with this one. She is easily worse than Hubert and Lorenz. Lorenz has his relic that helps fixes his bad movement early game and Hubert has better growths and can easily class change better.

3 hours ago, Garlyle said:

Hubert - Also one of the mages that have problem with survival, but he's one of the 3 mages who can wield dark magic without the dark classes. Very good in early game, but unfortunately he's only available in Edelgard's route.

Punishing someone for being available for one route I feel like is unfair. I personally think you should rate a unit's availability based on the house they are from. Since Byleth's weapon rank and everything can vary so much and makes a lot of things complicated.

[leesangstar10]

23 minutes ago, Silly said:

I don't think that skill is very good. It's helpful but very unnecessary.

It requires Lance A, which is a non-negligible investment given that the "optimal" class for all three of those units is Wyvern, which only needs Lance C. That extra tutoring could be put into something like authority instead. It also requires you to actually use a lance, which means you instantly lose out on ~6 attack (due to no axefaire and the difference in might between lances and axes).

Swift Strike is only active on player phase. It does not improve enemy phase combat at all. Player phase combat already has significantly easier thresholds to meet compared with enemy phase combat, since you have access to other combat arts, Death Blow, and Brave weaponry.

Overall I just think that skill doesn't really make that much of a difference. It's nice to have and might be situationally useful, but its impact on the overall viability of the unit is not significant enough for me to change my opinion of the character significantly.

Ig your correct since enemies aren't that hard to kill in hard. Idk maybe lunatic it might come in handy.

[Stroud]

54 minutes ago, Silly said:

Just going to point out that this is highly unrealistic.

Sword Avo means giving up your dancer, which is one of the better units in an efficient run. I would assume this does not exist.

Sword level 5 means you're using a subpar weapon type. I would expect +15 avoid at most (Bow or Lance Prowess) or +10 on Wyverns (Axe Prowess).

The +20 avoid battalions are incompatible with fliers. I believe the highest avoid you can get on a flying battalion is +15, and that is locked to the GD route. With the other two routes (or if you have a second dodgetank on GD) you can only get up to +10.

Also, the avoid rate on rattled units definitely goes down by more than 10.

After trying it, dodgetanking is fine imo. It's perfectly acceptable to do on 1-2 units per run. The numbers are more shaky than you make them seem though. It's certainly not 0% chance of getting hit ever.

1.Maybe there was something wrong and it looked like I was saying that you can make a team out of 10-12 Characters who play as dodgetank.

That is unrealistic not possible and also not a good way to play, I want to give different roles anyway. You can only make 1 or 2 units into dodgetank, if they cling together they actually might forfeit Sword Avo and only trade 10 Avoid. I agree, you should not build a team out of Dodgetanks as a few characters can make the most of it.

And you have to pick them carefully, Ferdinand or one of the better later Falcon Knights is a choice as long as you do not play around.

For me its just fun to have this one Dodgetank who can work alone, have some fun while not worrying to get hit. The most enemies have only 90-120 Hit, Assassins can be slightly more difficult as most of them are close to 130 hit. So yeah, my example could have been hit with 4% there.  

Bosses with a high hit rate can have around 140 hit. Maybe there is some more variance. I oversaw. But I cannot remember enemies with 150+ hit. I could imagine Death Knight has it with his personal skill in the later chapters.

2. Sword Avo is maybe the biggest counterpoint yeah, trading of a Dancer is a big decision you lose out on something. Can't say anything against this. Sadly I have to say that Black Avo and White Avo are less viable. For me it was more in theory if you invest as much as possible for the Dodgetank to show the limits. Outside of Gambits it is not a stretch to say that Ferdinand only gets hit 0%.

3. Avoid Battalions yeah, this one I missed out. As of now I also only know flying battalions with up to 15 Avoid.  -5 Avoid for me. 20 Avoid are only for grounded units. 

4. Guide -> Battalions -> Gambits and Rattling. It says that all values decrease by 10%, which includes Avo and Spe. Maybe Spe will take 1-2 more Avo away. Who knows. I know there are some things badly explained in the game. But they actually have not forgotten to explain this. It might be that they can stack I don't know. 

Hopefully I do not invest it too much into the discussion, but this is more I like it. You actually take apart what I write and it gets more into it. Ok, one point I remember is the Dancer which I really took out from the beginning, others have not been happy with for the look of it. 

Edited August 20, 2019 by Stroud

[leesangstar10]

Is it just me but I feel like Claude is better than M!Byleth? Not sure about female, but if wyvern lord is the best class for Byleth, then Claude should strictly be superior since he has a better legendary weapon? Idk maybe early game helps Byleth edge Claude out.

[ApocaLips]

57 minutes ago, leesangstar10 said:

I have been pushing swift strike so much but people think it is too late game. Personally I think the art is broken and the reason why I rate Sylvain, Ferdinand, Seteth higher than most people.

I just made an account to say I agree wholeheartedly. I also cannot comprehend why someone would give up Lancefaire, at least in the midgame, on a unit with a lance-only double lion when it represents ten frontloaded damage by itself. 

I’m obviously a new poster, but I’ve been playing FE regularly since FE7. Honestly, I disagree with a lot of what I’m seeing in this thread. There seems to be insane amounts of tunnel vision on fliers and mages with high mag/speed and very specific criteria for their spell list. 

The game is balanced a lot better than that. War Master gives +5 damage and 20 crit on a weapon type that inherently has the brave property. Its damage potential is way higher than I’m used to from fire emblems over the last decade, and it’s not even really being considered because it has two less move and no canto in a game where you have multiple shots of stride per map? Has anyone even tried a war master Felix with his relic?

Back to your point, I think Ferdinand is an insane unit. He has two relics that regen his HP, which synergizes with his passive. His evasion and mitigation are alright in isolation, but having both is worth more than the sum of either alone, and he ends up being quite tanky in a nonobvious way. On top of all of that, he gets swift strike, usually before part 2, which alone means his offense is superb (brave effect but able to use weapons with extra might, and the art itself even gives some might!), and he only needs to worry about speed enough to make sure he doesn’t get doubled. 

I love the discussion in this thread, but I really think a lot of people need to break away from the preconceived notion that everyone needs to be a wyvern lord/bow knight and take a look at certain units with a more open mind. This game has plenty of other stuff that would have been outright broken in any other entry in the series. I see a lot of value in and have had success with plenty of units and classes that are being overlooked here. 

Edited August 20, 2019 by ApocaLips

[Burklight]

3 minutes ago, ApocaLips said:

The game is balanced a lot better than that. War Master gives +5 damage and 20 crit on a weapon type that inherently has the brave property. Its damage potential is way higher than I’m used to from fire emblems over the last decade, and it’s not even really being considered because it has two less move and no canto in a game where you have multiple shots of stride per map? Has anyone even tried a war master Felix with his relic?

I did this on my GD run and it was busted. Particularly once you get QR, because he then doubles everything, never gets doubled, and typically takes half damage. He ended up being a more reliable boss killer than Byleth or Claude half way through part 2. Also War Master's strike is no joke. It's basically a weaker Atrocity that can be used with any axe. Felix might be an unusually strong candidate for War Master, but I think the class in general is very underrated. Hell, it even has an easy way to pick up Death Blow on the way.

[Silly]

12 minutes ago, ApocaLips said:

I just made an account to say I agree wholeheartedly. I also cannot comprehend why someone would give up Lancefaire, at least in the midgame, on a unit with a lance-only double lion when it represents ten frontloaded damage by itself. 

 I’m obviously a new poster, but I’ve been playing FE regularly since FE7. Honestly, I disagree with a lot of what I’m seeing in this thread. There seems to be insane amounts of tunnel vision on fliers and mages with high mag/speed and very specific criteria for their spell list. 

The game is balanced a lot better than that. War Master gives +5 damage and 20 crit on a weapon type that inherently has the brave property. Its damage potential is way higher than I’m used to from fire emblems over the last decade, and it’s not even really being considered because it has two less move and no canto in a game where you have multiple shots of stride per map? Has anyone even tried a war master Felix with his relic?

 Back to your point, I think Ferdinand is an insane unit. He has two relics that regen his HP and synergize with his passive. His evasion and mitigation are alright in isolation, but having both is worth more than the sum of both alone, and he ends up being very, very tanky in a nonobvious way. On top of all of that, he gets swift strike, usually before part 2, which alone means his offense is superb (brave effect but able to use weapons with extra might, and the art itself even gives some might!), and he only needs to worry about speed enough to make sure he doesn’t get doubled. 

 I love the discussion in this thread, but I really think a lot of people need to break away from the preconceived notion that everyone needs to be a wyvern lord/bow knight and take a look at certain units with a more open mind. This game has plenty of stuff that would have been outright broken in any other entry in the series. I see a lot of value in and have had success with plenty of units and classes that are being overlooked here. 

Here is a question, if the majority of classes are equally as good at killing enemies, why pick the one with 6 move when you can pick the one with 8 move? Getting a crit for 120 damage or whatever as a War Master doesn't really make much of a difference. The enemy is still dead regardless of whether you hit them for 100% of their HP or 200%.

It's not that the other option is unusable. It still kills enemies dead. It's just that in the context of an actual tier list the option with more mobility is clearly better, so it has a higher rank.

Being low tier in this game isn't such a bad thing, because there aren't really any truly unusable things (with the exception of maybe some weird stuff that nobody would actually do). But something has to be the worst.

Edited August 20, 2019 by Silly

[Flere210]

The problem is that fire emblem always reward stats benchmark, rather than having as much damage as possible. A war master can hit for 100 damage while a WL can only for 70, but what is the point if 70 is enought yo kill everything? The 30 extra damage are effectively wasted overkill. 

[ApocaLips]

8 minutes ago, Silly said:

Here is a question, if the majority of classes are equally as good at killing enemies, why pick the one with 6 move when you can pick the one with 8 move? Getting a crit for 120 or whatever on War Master doesn't really make much of a difference. The enemy is still dead regardless of whether you hit them for 100% of their HP or 200%.

It's not that the other option is unusable. It still kills enemies dead. It's just that in the context of an actual tier list the first option is clearly better, so it has a higher rank.

Being low tier in this game isn't such a bad thing, because there aren't really any truly unusable things (with the exception of maybe some weird stuff that nobody would actually do). But something has to be the worst.

This is pretty much what I’m talking about. It simply hasn’t been the case in my experience that the units we’re shoehorning into wyvern lord can suddenly one round everything in the game - and certainly not at every moment throughout the game. I’ve had multiple turns were I really needed to one-round a 80/100 HP monster health bar with various defensive abilities, and guess who did it? (Hint: Not my pegasus knight.)

I agree that even the worst units in this game are usable, but that’s not really my point here. 

Edited August 20, 2019 by ApocaLips

[Burklight]

2 minutes ago, Flere210 said:

The problem is that fire emblem always reward stats benchmark, rather than having as much damage as possible. A war master can hit for 100 damage while a WL can only for 70, but what is the point if 70 is enought yo kill everything? The 30 extra damage are effectively wasted overkill. 

Well, assuming you're not going to crit, gauntlets are safer because they let you front load more damage, unless you're using a brave axe. You also don't have a weakness to bows, and QR is stupidly underrated in a game where lots of enemies get 40+ speed. There's nothing stopping you from putting a brave axe and a no arrow shield on your DL, and you clearly should do those things, but those are limited resources. So if the perceived best thing to do in current meta is everyone needs flying, that means a lot of your fliers are going to be more vulnerable than a war master.  

[Silly]

Just now, ApocaLips said:

This is pretty much what I’m talking about. It simply hasn’t been the case in my experience that the units we’re shoehorning into wyvern lord can suddenly one round everything in the game - and certainly not at every moment throughout the game. I’ve had multiple turns were I really needed to one-round a 80/100 HP monster health bar, and guess who did it? (Hint: Not my pegasus knight.)

I agree that even the worst units in this game are usable, but that’s not really my point here. 

But Wyverns can actually just one round pretty much every enemy in the game. That's part of what makes them broken.

[Silly]

Just now, Burklight said:

Well, assuming you're not going to crit, gauntlets are safer because they let you front load more damage, unless you're using a brave axe. You also don't have a weakness to bows, and QR is stupidly underrated in a game where lots of enemies get 40+ speed. There's nothing stopping you from putting a brave axe and a no arrow shield on your DL, and you clearly should do those things, but those are limited resources. So if the perceived best thing to do in current meta is everyone needs flying, that means a lot of your fliers are going to be more vulnerable than a war master.  

The arrow weakness on fliers basically doesn't exist.

1. You can just kill the archer on player phase. You should be doing this anyways because you normally can't counter archers, so its more efficient to kill them on player phase and let the enemies you can counter kill themselves on enemy phase. In fact, fliers are specifically the easiest class to do this with, since they are highly mobile and ignore terrain, allowing them to close the distance to the archer from outside of the archer's attack range in many situations.

2. Archers can miss you if you're stacking avoid. They don't have absurdly high hit, often take hit penalties from attacking from range, and fliers are more dodgy than they honestly deserve to be in this game.

3. In the absolute worst case scenario, you can just press the dismount button. Dismounting is a free action, so you should really only be hit by arrows for effective damage if you mess up and somehow put your flier in range of an archer and then don't dismount.

[Hyper L Acc2]

13 minutes ago, Flere210 said:

The problem is that fire emblem always reward stats benchmark, rather than having as much damage as possible. A war master can hit for 100 damage while a WL can only for 70, but what is the point if 70 is enought yo kill everything? The 30 extra damage are effectively wasted overkill. 

That 30 surplus damage from War Master might be needed on Lunatic.

[Flere210]

Whichis what i really hope, but i am not optimist.

[Burklight]

2 minutes ago, Silly said:

The arrow weakness on fliers basically doesn't exist.

1. You can just kill the archer on player phase. You should be doing this anyways because you normally can't counter archers, so its more efficient to kill them on player phase and let the enemies you can counter kill themselves on enemy phase. In fact, fliers are specifically the easiest class to do this with, since they are highly mobile and ignore terrain, allowing them to close the distance to the archer from outside of the archer's attack range in many situations.

2. Archers can miss you if you're stacking avoid. They don't have absurdly high hit, often take hit penalties from attacking from range, and fliers are more dodgy than they honestly deserve to be in this game.

3. In the absolute worst case scenario, you can just press the dismount button. Dismounting is a free action, so you should really only be hit by arrows for effective damage if you mess up and somehow put your flier in range of an archer and then don't dismount.

I'm aware of all of those, and most of my parties from my last two runs have had a minimum of 3~4 fliers for those exact reasons. That said, I find it to be very helpful to have at least one or two units who can instantly kill literally anything who are also incapable of dying. It's possible that I like having units like that because of sub-optimal play, but the fact that it typically saves me turns makes me think it's valuable. Mobility isn't really a problem if you only have one or two because that's what warp is for.

Somewhat unrelated...has anyone toyed around with the battalion skills yet? Just having a crappy E rank battalion that you never replenish to have a permanent Wrath/Desperation/Vantage seems pretty strong in my theorycrafting. Hell, Dimitri gets both Wrath and Vantage this way with only A rank in authority...that's been a strong combo in previous games, and he could do it with 100% hp.

[Silly]

Just now, Burklight said:

Somewhat unrelated...has anyone toyed around with the battalion skills yet? Just having a crappy E rank battalion that you never replenish to have a permanent Wrath/Desperation/Vantage seems pretty strong in my theorycrafting. Hell, Dimitri gets both Wrath and Vantage this way with only A rank in authority...that's been a strong combo in previous games, and he could do it with 100% hp.

The big issue here is that most of these skills are pretty bad by themselves. It might specifically be decent on Dimitri because he gets both Wrath and Vantage, but I don't see how having only one of those three skills would be very helpful.

[Burklight]

1 minute ago, Silly said:

The big issue here is that most of these skills are pretty bad by themselves. It might specifically be decent on Dimitri because he gets both Wrath and Vantage, but I don't see how having only one of those three skills would be very helpful.

Well there's other weird edge cases than just Dimitri. Take Felix or Catherine for example...permanent Vantage + personal skill seems like a comparable trade to having a B rank battalion, except you can do it with a C rank in Authority. I think I'm going to try that with Felix on my next BL run. I'm also curious how Desperation works with Vantage...I know that based on their descriptions they should not work together, but given some other weird things (like how QR works) it might be worth trying. 

[LegendOfLoog]

Desperation and Vantage work together, but since Desperation is player phase and Vantage is end phase, they don't mesh very well.

[Burklight]

2 minutes ago, LegendOfLoog said:

Desperation and Vantage work together, but since Desperation is player phase and Vantage is end phase, they don't mesh very well.

Have you personally seen them not mesh well together? Or are you just going by the descriptions? Because some of the combat in this game is coded in such a way that it wouldn't surprise me if the game treated Vantage as a player phase initiate combat that would make Desperation work.

[Silly]

6 minutes ago, Burklight said:

 Well there's other weird edge cases than just Dimitri. Take Felix or Catherine for example...permanent Vantage + personal skill seems like a comparable trade to having a B rank battalion, except you can do it with a C rank in Authority. I think I'm going to try that with Felix on my next BL run. I'm also curious how Desperation works with Vantage...I know that based on their descriptions they should not work together, but given some other weird things (like how QR works) it might be worth trying. 

I don't think battalion vantage works with a dead battalion.

Also, vantage is not very useful if you do not OHKO enemies. Whether or not you attack first doesn't matter unless you're killing the enemy with  your first attack.