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I feel like Catherine is Slept On


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I haven't been seeing much talk about Catherine, but I feel like there are many advantages to using her. Mainly, even though she comes a little late, she's strong from the moment you get her. I'll be talking as if you recruit her in chapter 4, since that's when she most obviously shines. She has A swords, 19 strength, 20 speed, 13 defense, and swordfaire, all while starting at level 11 with solid growths. She's better than most of your units at chapter 4 at least, and stat wise, she's usable throughout the entire game, staying strong. She's basically an FE4 prepromote. 

 

She definitely has major movement problems though. Since she comes late, it's even harder to get her E flying to B+ for falcon knight, and assassin is way easier to get, but only 6 move. Despite that, I wanted to talk about her strengths since I feel like I don't see them getting mentioned enough. Interested to see the discussion

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I think she's cool! Her design is neat, and I also like her for being a tough woman that shares her name with my mom. 😛 I'm glad to see a cool lady have my mom's name, basically.

I never recruited her in my first playthrough, but I think I will this time! Went Blue Lions this time to have a certain redhead from the beginning after I'd done a Golden Deer playthrough and recruited him. XD

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Assassin is an easy switch to bring her movement to acceptable levels. Just a few ranks in bows away. 

She’s a good unit. She’s also very straightforward, which is probably why she doesn’t get a lot of talk. There’s also only so much space for sword units in this game. 

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Yeah, Catherine is a beast. She actually joins you automatically on one of the paths, which is neat. Her movement was never an issue for me, because I tend to take things slowly, anyway. What bothers me about her is her blind faith in Rhea. Blind faith or blind obedience in general has always bugged me. I'm fine with her character otherwise, but that little detail is... ehhh.

Edited by DragonFlames
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If mobility is a concern (because who thought that 5 move swordmasters were okay), she can be tutored in Lances and Flying right away since she already has all the sword rank she will ever need for Falco and then some. That way you can get a pegasus that has stupidly good bases and growths.

Edited by Jakkun
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She's a good unit, but I do feel like she falls off a bit. For comparison, I think Shamir holds up much better on the long run. But yeah, early on she's absurd.

That said, she's such an annoying bland character that I just never ended up using her much. You'd think they learned to write this kind of people with Hubert and Dedue being amazing, but I guess you gotta have a bad one to make the others shine.

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29 minutes ago, timon said:

She's a good unit, but I do feel like she falls off a bit. For comparison, I think Shamir holds up much better on the long run. But yeah, early on she's absurd.

That said, she's such an annoying bland character that I just never ended up using her much. You'd think they learned to write this kind of people with Hubert and Dedue being amazing, but I guess you gotta have a bad one to make the others shine.

I feel that she falls into the issue of there being better units and limited slots when Byleth is already most likely the go to sword unit blender and a free high might brave sword is goIn to be useful even if you lack the crest.

Edited by CyberNinja
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I used her a lot in my GD run, however I would hardly use her Thunderbrand since repairing it was a pain. She kinda fell off for me towards end game though, while I didn't have very many sword units, most of my other team became better than her anyways. Her mobility was trash too.

Personality-wise, she suffered the same traits as Cyril did, never being able to shut up about how great Rhea was. The only support of hers I really liked was with Shamir. The start of their support, Catherine idolizes Rhea so much, but Shamir eventually helps Catherine realize that maybe Shamir is also important to her. While I loved how in their A+ support that 

Spoiler

Shamir basically proposes marriage to Catherine

these two are another example of IS waving gay subtext in the face of players, but not making either character S supports for F!Byleth

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4 hours ago, xchickengirlx said:

these two are another example of IS waving gay subtext in the face of players, but not making either character S supports for F!Byleth

Just because they have the gay subtext doesn't mean they're interested in every woman on the planet.

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Flat out my most effective unit in the game, though obviously RNG is a factor here. My team is about level 30-32, and she's the only unit with more than 30 in both Atk and Spd. Going to move her into a flying class soon (curse my lack of pre-planning), but putting up with her as a footlocked class has been well worth it regardless.

Character-wise, I'm quite fond of her too. Just about the right amount of masculinity for me, is the tallest woman in the monastery, has relatively practical hair, and is a good age to have practical life experience. As I've said before, there are very few FE character who it'd be fun to have a beer with, and Catherine is one of those few. I get the complaints about the Rhea thing, but hey, most of the routes will end up with Rhea out of the way. 😉 And that's where I step into the void. *nudge nudge*

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If I can turn Ignatz into a Wyvern Lord, I think it's more than possible for Catherine to go Falcoknight.  She'll need a lot of flying and some lance help though.

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7 minutes ago, eclipse said:

If I can turn Ignatz into a Wyvern Lord, I think it's more than possible for Catherine to go Falcoknight.  She'll need a lot of flying and some lance help though.

Speaking from personal experience, yeah you most definitely can. You just have to get her goals updated immediately and make sure you spend time tutoring her. Most likely won't ever reach 100% pass rate until endgame or even ng+ so you'll have to save scum/keep buying seals to get her promoted at a reasonable time.

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5 minutes ago, NegativeExponents- said:

Speaking from personal experience, yeah you most definitely can. You just have to get her goals updated immediately and make sure you spend time tutoring her. Most likely won't ever reach 100% pass rate until endgame or even ng+ so you'll have to save scum/keep buying seals to get her promoted at a reasonable time.

Have her go backwards for a bit into Pegasus Knight.  Not like she objects to Darting Blow anyway.

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For me Catherine is S tier. Starts as a Swordmaster(doesn't even need to switch classes), bring the Thunderbrand, good speed and avoid, can unlock self-healing from brawling early on. Also in my playthrough if she fell behind in levelling, there was no issue when it came to catching up. I think she's the best recruit from the church.

Edited by Garlyle
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This game works weirdly in that unit availability isn't tied to progression all that much like it is standard FE games. If you don't recruit anyone from other houses you get like only less than 20 units. So your units aren't as shafted as they usually are when someone big and stronk shows up. Nonetheless Catherine is too good to pass up and while she may fall behind the units that are the best endgame she'll definitely pull her weight like Jagens and Oifeys endgame. Movement is an issue of the Swordmaster class, but like people mentioned: go flier route via Pegasus.

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Catherine is an awesome unit, but like a lot of people said, there's almost nothing you can actually do with her.

To start with, like Shamir, Catherine is an extremely strong unit, starting with fairly busted stats and good growths.

Catherine doubles down on this by having the hands down best sword in the entire game, Thunderbrand. Seriously, it's so good, it's almost not worth having her use anything but swords.

Funtionally, it's a brave sword, but has both more might and less weight, and 10% base crit. Jesus. It's only flaw is 10 less hit, which... it's a sword, so, whatever.

Shamir starts as a sniper, which means she's a shoo-in for bow knight. Reclassing her to cavalier or paladin is a good idea, then, since she can grab desperation or aegis, or you can reclass her to a wyvern if you're not sick of those yet.

Catherine is a TERRIBLE mortal savant, with her weakness in reason and garbage spell list, so that's rather pointless. You can't make her a dancer, which sucks, because you could definitely make some broken builds through that.

Her only real master class option then is Falcon Knight, but that only gives lancefaire, not swordfaire. Mortal Savant is out, and none of the other classes give her much. She can't even take advantage of her brawling as a war master.

For advanced classes, sure assassin is fine, but she loses sword crit +10, which given her existing bonuses is really a pain. With the crit ring, she's got a base crit of 25, which if she quads (and she WILL quad. Thunderbrand's weight is 7, for heaven's sake. She'll never not quad) means she'll be criting a lot.

So... really, all you can do is just leave her where she is. Maybe go back and grab deathblow off of warrior to make her even more busted, maybe grab vantage, wrath, or desperation if you want to have fun.

She's a really good unit, it's just that there's not a ton to actually play around with her.

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@dragonlordsd In other words, she's great out of the box.

So you could go back searching for more skills for her in intermediate or master classes, but it's not really needed. Combat Arts she gets are fine, Healing Focus is easy to unlock. From training swords, he can get the abilities she needs the most, she can go with Sword Prowess Lv 5, Sword Crit +10, Axebreaker, Authority Lv.X and maybe some ability that she picked up from training certain movement types.

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35 minutes ago, Garlyle said:

@dragonlordsd In other words, she's great out of the box.

So you could go back searching for more skills for her in intermediate or master classes, but it's not really needed. Combat Arts she gets are fine, Healing Focus is easy to unlock. From training swords, he can get the abilities she needs the most, she can go with Sword Prowess Lv 5, Sword Crit +10, Axebreaker, Authority Lv.X and maybe some ability that she picked up from training certain movement types.

Axebreaker is almost overkill. Sword prowess 5 gives the highest avoid bonus from skill level in the game (+20), but if you're running into a lot of axes, do as you like.

For full min/maxing on her, I'd go with swordmaster to get the following:

Class abilities:

Swordfaire

Sword Crit +10

Equipped abilities:

Deathblow

Sword Prowess 5

Darting Blow/Armored Blow (depending on how she builds speed/def wise)

Aegis

Vantage/Desperation

I'd love to swap one of those for Sword Avoid +20, but she can't be a dancer... Obviously, you can swap a few of these in and out depending on other skills. Weight -3/Weight -5, Movement +1, and Alert Stance could each replace darting or armored blow. Aegis is mostly to keep her from getting sniped. 

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Eveyone else is taking about her from a gameplay perspective so I'll just talk about story/supports. 

When she first popped up during the Lonato chapter I wasn't super hype since she came off as a crazy religious murderer and obviously was a kill stealing Green NPC. However, I then got her supports with Shamir and Ashe, which do a lot to add to her depth. I feel like she's not nearly as blindly devoted to Rhea as Cyril is and a lot of it is her trying to desperately convince herself that shes made the right decisions in her life. She's also a fairly reasonable mentor figure in her supports with other people too. Honestly, her Byleth support is her weakest chain. 

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I want to sleep on Catherine.

I think for how she performs as a unit and what she can do at base she is treated pretty fairly - a good unit, but not a great one, and only gets worse the longer you wait to join her.

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Of characters that get ignored. Catherine seems fine for what she does. Great base stats though her endgame class can be changed depending when you get her. Not too much of a problem. 

I don't know if Seteth is undervalued. He joins with great stats and his skill ranks is fantastic. Only thing you just have to do for him is make him use axes over lances as a wyvern. Maybe his speed might be a problem early on but enemies in general aren't very fast. 

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1 hour ago, De Geso said:

I want to sleep on Catherine.

I think for how she performs as a unit and what she can do at base she is treated pretty fairly - a good unit, but not a great one, and only gets worse the longer you wait to join her.

Hard Truths.

Yeah, it seems the knights are significantly better the earlier you recruit them.

That said, Catherine gets a bump above being just a good unit purely off of how ridiculous Thunderbrand is.

Due to how the game is balanced, at present brave weapons are pretty broken, and Thunderbrand is an even more broken brave sword, to the point it's a little silly.

It has a weight of 7, making it the fourth lightest sword and fifth lightest weapon in the game. It also has a might of 13, only two less than Byleth's creator sword.

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