Guide to Maddening: Changes from Other Difficulties and Adjusting Your Strategy

[Vitezen]

I'm writing this guide as a quick breakdown to explain how Maddening differs from other difficulty levels and what changes need to be made in the general strategy to succeed. At the time I'm making this post, I haven't played Maddening myself, so this guide will be useful as a learning tool for both myself and anyone else on the forum. I've gathered these insights from reading posts from other players about their own experiences playing this mode. People are free to discuss the nature of Maddening in this thread, and if new information comes to light, I'll edit the OP to include it. I've also written the guide in a way that doesn't focus on being a walkthrough for each chapter, explaining what to do or what character to use, but rather what is the general best way to play the game to maximize your chances of success.

• Gardening for stat-boosting items is important in order to counter the buffed enemies. You'll need these items to make your strong units even better, rather than fixing flaws in weaker units to make them adequate. Cooking also provides a temporary, but useful, advantage.
• Enemies will greatly outspeed you, making training weapons important for improving your own speed... BUT there will be more units who can benefit from using heavy weapons if they can't ever avoid getting doubled. Because enemy units are fast enough to double even speedy allies, defensive characters with low speed lose one of their downsides and become more important for tanking. However, the enemy's speed advantage will eventually be neutralized as they begin to switch to heavier weapons, and your allies gain more speed over time.
• And because of the general strength of enemy units, rallying is now more important. Units who have early access to rally strength, defense, speed, or dexterity gain value for supporting your stronger units.
• Bows are more important. Many units may not be able to survive multiple attacks. This makes having a bow important for staying useful by dealing damage safely, even if the unit isn't specializing in that weapon. Javelins and hand axes just aren't worth it. However, the greater importance of bows also means that more students will like to become snipers and bow knights. Hit +20 from archer is also significant.
• Debuffs are more useful because enemies live longer. Units who learn seal abilities from their budding talents may want to consider dipping into them even if their skill won't be used. Again, archers are also useful for their combat arts that apply a debuff.
• Gambits are more important. Like bows, they allow you to deal damage safely. When dealing with large groups of enemies, multi-target gambits can also help you debuff and immobilize enemies, letting you pick them off at your leisure. Also, support gambits like stride, retribution, and impregnable wall are worth using.
• Combat arts are more important. Their added accuracy allows units to reliably confirm kills, and their higher power compared to a normal attack is significant when units are unlikely to double.
• Skill experience from lessons is halved. This means that students are inclined to enter classes whose skill requirements more closely match their strengths... BUT this is mitigated by a greater volume of enemies, resulting in more skill experience. However, this benefit doesn't extend to units who will spend most of the game not in a class that trains a skill required for their final class, such as mages who plan to become dark knights. Units may not be able to afford to dip into classes like brigand or pegasus knight for their useful mastery abilities. Characters who can most easily enter the more powerful classes, such as wyvern lord, are more valuable.
• Recruits are both tougher to acquire and benefit more from late recruitment. Recruited units gain stat boosts as they're considered enemies until recruited, meaning you gain from leaving them unrecruited as long as possible. However, this also means that bad default skill training is more devastating to a recruit's potential, especially with the reduced skill gain for your own students giving you less leeway to fix it. All in all, this reduces the pool of great recruits while also making the best recruits even better. Students who are recruited early will have to be very useful immediately to make up for their lack of enemy bonuses.
  • A general rule for early recruits: Archers are fine as early recruits because their bows are immediately useful and their low growths aren't significantly helped by enemy bonuses. Mages greatly benefit from early recruitment because they often have trouble meeting benchmarks for learning needed spells due to not learning reason or faith fast enough without the player training them.
• Maps will tend to take longer, at least in the early game, due to the extreme power imbalance. You may have to spend many turns systematically pulling and killing enemies one by one. This is less significant later in the game, when your units become stronger.
• Enemy reinforcements can move on the turn they appear.

Edited September 30, 2019 by Vitezen

[Silly]

I'm going to note that the horribly high enemy AS is only really there in the super early game. It's certainly not the case that your fast units will get doubled by everything, and in fact your fast units can actually double enemies.

Chapter 2 enemies have completely ridiculous AS for this point in the game, and will double the majority of units you have. But after this chapter enemy AS actually sort of starts to stagnate, especially later on pre-timeskip as enemies start picking up steel weapons and getting weighed down by massive amounts.

Meanwhile, your units will gain significant amounts of AS over the course of the pre-timeskip chapters, from level ups, from gardening for stat boosters, from cooking meals, and from actually being able to wield weapons that don't weigh them down.

There are some exceptions. The fast enemy types, like Thieves/Assassins/Swordmasters you probably won't ever be able to realistically double, but those enemies can be very realistically dispatched on player phase. For the rest of the enemies, your faster units can very realistically start doubling them about midway through the pre-timeskip chapters.

That's not to say that speed is a non-important stat. It's probably actually even more important on Maddening than on other difficulties, because doubling vastly increases your damage output against otherwise pretty bulky enemy units, and the speed benchmark to consistently double enemies is high enough that you actually need to plan a little, instead of having all your units double every enemy ever.

[eclipse]

I think the general recruiting rule is that students can be recruited later, while faculty wants to be recruited sooner, with Catherine being a weird edge case (she doesn't care when she's recruited).  Student archers may want to be recruited sooner because archer growths aren't impressive, but the only one I'd go out of my way for is Bernadetta (getting her to A Bows is obnoxious, but making enemies stay put without burning a gambit is worth it).

Regardless, I'll be able to test this soon enough.  I have a story run and then some to do, a NG+ run if I feel like it, then I'll connect my Switch to the Internet.

[Wuzzy]

BL route has the "easiest" (comparatively) time in Maddening, while BE have the hardest time (specifically CF route)

In addition to the Rally point, could also add a subpoint about debuffing. Characters that have the earliest access to debuffs include Lysithea (Swarm -5 Spd) and Hubert (Mire, -5 Def). Though there are other units with Seal Stat abilities like Hilda/Ferdinand (Seal Spd) and Ignatz (Seal Str) which can be obtained in 2-3 instruct sessions, and they can proc them with Bows/Ranged Weapons like Hand Axe / Javelin. Also combat arts like Waning Shot (-5 Str) and Break Shot (-5 Def) that usually appear with C+ Bows on certain units (I believe Ignatz and Leonie receive one of the 2, and Mercedes unlocks Waning Shot through her Budding Talent if that's desirable). Encloser and in rarer cases Ward Arrow also have their uses but, they are locked behind A ranked bows for the units that get them.

For the recruiting portion, in addition to Archers having weaker growths and benefiting from early recruitment since their Chapter 23 stats aren't very impressive... All the Mages benefit from an earlier recruitment just because you want them to unlock their good Reason/Faith Spells ASAP (Dorothea's Meteor/Physic, Lysithea Dark Spikes/Warp, Linhardt Warp, etc.) since they usually end up at like C/C+/B Rank Reason/Faith (usually, depends on what rank they start) in Chapter 12. 

Female Byleth is generally better than Male Byleth due to access to Pegasus Knight for early flight utility (and an easier transition to Wyvern Lord/Falconknight so you can train that Flight rank early on) and, it allows you to automatically recruit Sylvain to have an earlier access to the Lance of Ruin (if you deny Rhea after Miklan's chapter) which is another bonus. Also the extra Bullion Sylvain comes with doesn't hurt early on considering you will be spending quite a lot of money on training weapons / bows.

Also this is a pretty big point but, I feel that Maddening mode doesn't really penalize you for going slow early on due to lack of reinforcements (Chapter 5 and Ingrid/Dorothea's Paralogue are obviously exceptions) and that enemies generally won't budge unless you deliberately aggro them/get in their range. Unless you're goal is to LTC, don't bother with worrying about your turncount and just take chapters slowly since the hardest chapters in Maddening are the first 4-5 ones (until Chapter 13, thieves chapter). Once reinforcements are a big thing in Part 2, your team should generally be able to handle them decently well for the most part.

Adding on to the Gambit point, utility gambits, specifically Impregnable Wall and Retribution (obviously Stride is very useful as well) are also very handy and don't require too much effort to get since they need D Auth (BL route has the Kingdom Archers battalion which gives Retribution at D Auth, BE/GD houses need to wait until A Auth, GD House needs C Auth for Impregnable Wall too)

Edited September 30, 2019 by Lunarly

[Boomhauer007]

While it might be better statistically to recruit late, I feel like you lose out on skills too much for it to be worth it. Intermediate classes have some of the most useful skills in the game, and waiting too long forces you to send units backwards through those.

I might also add a note about combat arts that allow you to double becoming much much better. It was never necessary on hard, but things like Hunters Volley and Swift Strikes are free doubles on units that otherwise would never be able to.

[Silly]

You can reclass for intermediate skills.

For example:

Say you recruit Ferdinand/Sylvain/Hilda at the beginning of Chapter 10. The unit joins with C+ Lances, C+ Axes. You want to reclass to Wyvern (because who wouldn't want to be a Wyvern?).

You set the unit's training to Axes + Flying with the goal of reclassing into Wyvern Rider before the end of Chapter 11. In the meantime, you can reclass into Brigand for free (you already meet the axe rank) and begin building class exp towards Death Blow. At this point you should already have a Knowledge Gem, which cuts down the number of actions you need to master Death Blow to 25. You have all of chapter 10 and all of chapter 11 (minus the end of month battle) to see 25 actions, which should be very doable. If you don't want to deal with a 5 move unit at this point in the game, you can even set your unit as an adjutant to a healer or a more mobile unit, and they will build class exp just as quickly as if you had deployed them.

Your recruit isn't going to be super useful before Chapter 11 anyways, since they're not a Wyvern Rider yet, so you don't miss out on that much by setting them as an adjutant. As a result, you might as well take that opportunity to grab Death Blow.

You can do the same thing with someone like Leonie if you want to grab Hit +20, though that skill is less important than Death Blow.

Edited September 30, 2019 by Silly

[Shadow Mir]

12 minutes ago, Silly said:

You can reclass for intermediate skills.

For example:

Say you recruit Ferdinand/Sylvain/Hilda at the beginning of Chapter 10. The unit joins with C+ Lances, C+ Axes. You want to reclass to Wyvern (because who wouldn't want to be a Wyvern?).

You set the unit's training to Axes + Flying with the goal of reclassing into Wyvern Rider before the end of Chapter 11. In the meantime, you can reclass into Brigand for free (you already meet the axe rank) and begin building class exp towards Death Blow. At this point you should already have a Knowledge Gem, which cuts down the number of actions you need to master Death Blow to 25. You have all of chapter 10 and all of chapter 11 (minus the end of month battle) to see 25 actions, which should be very doable. If you don't want to deal with a 5 move unit at this point in the game, you can even set your unit as an adjutant to a healer or a more mobile unit, and they will build class exp just as quickly as if you had deployed them.

Your recruit isn't going to be super useful before Chapter 11 anyways, since they're not a Wyvern Rider yet, so you don't miss out on that much by setting them as an adjutant. As a result, you might as well take that opportunity to grab Death Blow.

You can do the same thing with someone like Leonie if you want to grab Hit +20, though that skill is less important than Death Blow.

For curiosity's sake, is Sothis's paralogue much worse on Maddening? I've read horror stories of some paralogues...

[dragontamer]

25 minutes ago, Shadow Mir said:

For curiosity's sake, is Sothis's paralogue much worse on Maddening? I've read horror stories of some paralogues...

I remember two Knowledge Gems: is the Sothis Paralogue the only knowledge gem pre-timeskip?

 

Either way: Knowledge Gems are rare. The Knowledge Gem may help your first recruit, but your 2nd recruit (and onwards) is now competing for the gem. IIRC, Silly was advocating for route-specific tier lists to account for this... using the units associated with your house has a lot fewer resource constraints than using units from outside your house.

Edited September 30, 2019 by dragontamer

[Shadow Mir]

2 minutes ago, dragontamer said:

I remember two Knowledge Gems: is the Sothis Paralogue the only knowledge gem pre-timeskip?

Far as I know, yes.

[Anathaco]

32 minutes ago, Shadow Mir said:

For curiosity's sake, is Sothis's paralogue much worse on Maddening? I've read horror stories of some paralogues...

Yes. I’m not the most skilled player you’ll find, but my god that map was impossible. Taking out one of the beasts is fine, as long as you can aggressively gang up on them, but then you have the three birds at the start of the map flying at you, plus two more that show up as reinforcements, plus an extra wolf as a reinforcement for good measure. They also doubled all my units and hit pretty hard too. At least in BE, where your units are kind of slow and squishy throughout the whole game (plus you miss out on powerhouses like Catherine, who would have made that map a bit easier), I literally could not complete it. I tried like 3 or 4 times, and gave up when I realised it expired at the end of the month, and I still had no chance.

If anybody actually did manage to heat it on Maddening BE, please share. I’m curious to know how you did it.

[Silly]

51 minutes ago, Shadow Mir said:

For curiosity's sake, is Sothis's paralogue much worse on Maddening? I've read horror stories of some paralogues...

I found it pretty easy to be honest.

Unlike most maps, the Sothis paralogue doesn't have ambush spawns. The beasts are stronger, but not significantly stronger than on Hard mode, and you can still exploit them heavily with gambits. Just break their barriers to stun them, or bait them to attack a stronger member. You can exploit weapon weaknesses on the wolves to kill them easier (check which weapon they're weak to), and the birds are always weak to bows.

26 minutes ago, dragontamer said:

Either way: Knowledge Gems are rare. The Knowledge Gem may help your first recruit, but your 2nd recruit (and onwards) is now competing for the gem. IIRC, Silly was advocating for route-specific tier lists to account for this... using the units associated with your house has a lot fewer resource constraints than using units from outside your house.

House members have very significant resource constraints, in that there is not nearly enough exp in the very early game to get all your units to the point where they are good units in the early game. I would only really recommend training like maybe 4-5 combat units and benching the rest. The rest of the slots are filled with recruits. Assuming you have 4 frontline units from your house, add in potentially Catherine/Shamir as early recruits, add Seteth as a late recruit, then that really leaves roughly 2-3 combat slots that should probably be filled with cross recruits.

Also, it's not like the cross recruits monopolize the Knowledge Gem. They only really need it for a map or two, and then they can pass it on to the next cross recruit. All it takes is 25 combats to get class mastery (which shouldn't take very long since your cross recruit can ride as an adjutant to whoever your best unit is, which means they'll be seeing a lot of combat) and then the next one can take it. This is even easier if you're doing it in Chapter 13 instead of pre-timeskip, since you have two Knowledge Gems at that point. That should be completely fine for the 2-3 cross recruits you are probably using.

Edited September 30, 2019 by Silly

[Shadow Mir]

13 minutes ago, Silly said:

I found it pretty easy to be honest.

Unlike most maps, the Sothis paralogue doesn't have ambush spawns. The beasts are stronger, but not significantly stronger than on Hard mode, and you can still exploit them heavily with gambits. Just break their barriers to stun them, or bait them to attack a stronger member. You can exploit weapon weaknesses on the wolves to kill them easier (check which weapon they're weak to), and the birds are always weak to bows

Were you using the Blue Lions? Because I'd imagine it'd be much harder with the Black Eagles. Anyway, far as I know, the wolves on this map do not have weaknesses, at least on hard; the only weakness I see is an axe weakness on the Wild Demonic Beast you must kill to win.

[Silly]

My bad, they're not weak to anything.

I was playing BL. Here is the one screenshot that I have saved from that map, because it was a cute occurrence. 

Spoiler

If you can see in the screenshot, I have six combat units: Byleth, Dimitri, Felix, Dedue, Catherine, Shamir. Four of them are level 20 (the advanced class helps, and the recommended level for the map is 19 anyways so by the time you get around to doing it it's pretty likely you'll be around this point). Catherine and Shamir are a little underleveled but they don't have a good advanced class to go into anyways so I prioritized getting the other four units to 20. Mercedes is a healer, Annette is mostly a rally bot, and Ingrid is my dancer. Ignatz is a really shitty cross recruit that I only deployed because I had a free slot, and he can use gambits and occasionally break a barrier by chipping from 3 range with a bow.

For BE you will probably have Byleth, Edelgard, Ferdinand, Petra as your primary combat units instead of the four I had. They shouldn't be significantly worse on this front than the BL house at this point. (It's only the really early game that the extra BL combat is really important). Missing Catherine is a bit annoying because she's an additional good combat unit, but you can probably fill the void with a different midgame recruit and still be okay. The other units can literally be anything. Mercedes can be any Physic healer (the BE house actually has two, which is somewhat nice), Annette can be cross recruited early if you need an underleveled mage/rally bot. Ignatz can be literally anybody.

Not to mention that you can probably just cheese the map if you don't want to fight all those beasts (maybe you don't have enough good gambits or something). The only objective is kill boss. You can ignore most of the enemies and just go and bonk the boss guy if you really wanted to end the map early, which saves needing to fight like half of the enemies on the map.

[Tombstone88]

Just wanted to chime in that I'm doing Black Eagles (currently just finished Chapter 13 of Crimson Flower), and I can state that, at least in my opinion, Sothis's paralogue was one of the easier ones to complete.  The two paralogues that really gave me difficulty were Ingrid's (first one that unlocked; not a good idea to do it right away) and Felix's (keeping everyone alive, Rodrigue included, was a pain in the ass).

[Seafarer]

7 hours ago, dragontamer said:

I remember two Knowledge Gems: is the Sothis Paralogue the only knowledge gem pre-timeskip?

 

Either way: Knowledge Gems are rare. The Knowledge Gem may help your first recruit, but your 2nd recruit (and onwards) is now competing for the gem. IIRC, Silly was advocating for route-specific tier lists to account for this... using the units associated with your house has a lot fewer resource constraints than using units from outside your house.

You get a second Knowledge Gem after C11 if you save all (some? not sure of the exact requirements, since I've never lost any) the Crest Stones.

[Cysx]

9 hours ago, Silly said:

House members have very significant resource constraints, in that there is not nearly enough exp in the very early game to get all your units to the point where they are good units in the early game.

That happened on hard too, it's a result of the game throwing enemies of lower tiered classes at you that give less exp, but chapter 2 already mixes in many archers, thieves, etc, and same for chapter 3. I didn't use every unit in my house this run(didn't train Raphael and Hilda was chipping and providing positional support for most of the earlygame), but I definitely don't think it's impossible or even that difficult.

Optimal being another story entirely.

[Modirufa6317]

Unless you're planning to recruit a lot of students from other houses, keeping everyone at the recommended level for each chapter is not hard at all, especially once paralogue start appearing.

In fact, it's very recommended to do this if you don't want to have a miserable time in chapter 13.

[GrySun]

17 hours ago, Anathaco said:

If anybody actually did manage to heat it on Maddening BE, please share. I’m curious to know how you did it.

I just beat it last night on Maddening BE. I did it as soon as it was available, ie. the month after the Battle of the Eagle and Lion. So everyone was in the range of lvl 14-15. I did the paralogue immediately because I wanted the Knowledge Gem, and the extra divine pulse usages sounded nice too. I used BE-characters + Flayn only, with 2 adjutants of 2 recruited characters(though these didn‘t help anything I think).

 

Basically the beginning is pretty simple. The teacher moves right to the woods to intercept the first wolf, in the meantime the class kills the wolf in front of them. Then they kill the wolf that attacked the teacher, then the one coming up. This makes the birds and boss move, while also spawning 2 birds and a wolf. Use gambits whenever necessary, since you‘re BE you should have access to at least 2 battalions with Blaze(the fire barrel cart), the range is huge and will destroy one monster‘s barrier right away and heavily damage another one if close(the birds were often close by). At this point it was looking well and was ready to intercept the 3 birds from the start, but then they spawn 2 more birds and 1 wolf as reinforcements. This is the panic-part where you need to play it very well, and use all divine pulses you have until you figure out what works for you.

 

For me the biggest help was knowing how the monster AI works. Once they start charging their AOE attack they won‘t move unless there is at least 1 unit in range to be hit by it. This way you can get a free turn where that beast doesn‘t move to kill your mages and healers, which are all one-rounded by any bird or wolf. For others you can gain time by battalion usage to make them attack a tanky character that turn, or break the barrier for others so they are stunned for their next turn, missing an action. Since both birds and wolves have half-barriers any normal attack breaks one, after which they won‘t counterattack 1 time. You can then destroy another tile without counterattacks, continuing on safely like this until all 4 are broken.

 

It was very hard on BE but possible if you try to gain as much time as possible, blocking the birds‘ path to your squishier units so they attack someone else, leave 1 tanky person to tank the AOE attacks(for those anyone with full hp can tank it, since it doesn‘t double and might is around 39). Beware that each wolf has pass so you can‘t block their way, battalion or break their barriers asap. If you have units with higher sword and axe skills there are combat arts to deal big damage to monsters for both sword and axe users.

Finally the Gambit Stride batallion should help in dire situations for running away or being able to reach the back-squares of barriers to break.

Edited October 1, 2019 by GrySun

[DefyingFates]

1 hour ago, GrySun said:

Finally the Gambit batallion

Which Gambit are you referring to, Fusillade?

[Chaotix]

2 hours ago, DefyingFates said:

Which Gambit are you referring to, Fusillade?

I would guess Stride based on context

[GrySun]

2 hours ago, DefyingFates said:

Which Gambit are you referring to, Fusillade?

Ah mistyped. Stride indeed. I had mine on Linhardt, but can be on anyone. Since I used both Stride usages I assume they‘re pretty necessary in a pinch.

[GrySun]

It‘s not a must, just helps a lot when you make a mistake or if your units aren‘t ideally placed.

[Silly]

6 hours ago, Modirufa6317 said:

Unless you're planning to recruit a lot of students from other houses, keeping everyone at the recommended level for each chapter is not hard at all, especially once paralogue start appearing.

In fact, it's very recommended to do this if you don't want to have a miserable time in chapter 13.

There definitely isn't enough exp to level everybody early on.

Later on (for example, say we're at Ch 6) why would I start leveling someone who has mostly been doing chip damage and is still level 2 when I could instead invest in a cross recruited student with inflated stats (due to enemy growth bonuses), or one of the faculty members like Catherine or Shamir?

Also chapter 13 isn't that hard if Byleth is strong. Particularly if he/she is a strong flier. The enemy AI on that map sucks (they just stand there doing nothing until you approach them) so it's not very hard to keep your units out of threat range and fight only the enemies that you actually want to fight. I had literally three combat units that could take a hit on that map and it was completely fine.

[Modirufa6317]

1 hour ago, Silly said:

There definitely isn't enough exp to level everybody early on.

Later on (for example, say we're at Ch 6) why would I start leveling someone who has mostly been doing chip damage and is still level 2 when I could instead invest in a cross recruited student with inflated stats (due to enemy growth bonuses), or one of the faculty members like Catherine or Shamir?

Also chapter 13 isn't that hard if Byleth is strong. Particularly if he/she is a strong flier. The enemy AI on that map sucks (they just stand there doing nothing until you approach them) so it's not very hard to keep your units out of threat range and fight only the enemies that you actually want to fight. I had literally three combat units that could take a hit on that map and it was completely fine.

As I said, it's not a problem if you don't recruit a lot of characters. As long you fix a hard limit to like 13-12 units max (including all from your main house), you definitively have plenty enough exp to keep up with the game.

Of course, you're free to play however you want, but claiming that benching characters & that restraining the nbr of units to less than suggested by the game is a necessity in maddening is just pure misinformation.

[AxelVDP]

2 hours ago, Silly said:

There definitely isn't enough exp to level everybody early on.

Later on (for example, say we're at Ch 6) why would I start leveling someone who has mostly been doing chip damage and is still level 2 when I could instead invest in a cross recruited student with inflated stats (due to enemy growth bonuses), or one of the faculty members like Catherine or Shamir?

can confirm that you indeed can keep a good ammount of units levelled up. at first I was hesitant to keep investing into shittier units, but since I enjoy the immersion I get by using all my in-house units I tried anyway. turned out it was not that hard to do, maddening is not nearly half as punishing as people make it out to be, especially after the very early game. I'm actually glad I kept training my weaker units because I got pleasantly surprised by some. for example my Flayn has been surprisingly instrumental into making some "hard" maps a breeze, my Ashe miracously turned out pretty strong after learning death blow and started to be a good player phase unit capable of one rounding lots of different enemies (!!!) (also never fed him any stat boosters), also saved me tons of money with chests and doors (flying thieves are super comfy)

I'm near the end of BL maddening and I still feel slightly overlevelled with my core team of 15 people lol (no NG+, no online, no DLCs, the game would probably be super easy  with these on), the game is really not that hard if you know what you're doing, and even on maddening you are still allowed tons of room for customization and moderately gimmicky stuff