Recruitment Tier List

[Wuzzy]

32 minutes ago, Silly said:

I think you're really overestimating how difficult it is to recruit students. It's not super hard to do full recruitment even of efficiency. Just explore a lot, plant flowers at every opportunity (something you should be doing anyways), and buy the cheap gifts every month.

Sure, you don't need to recruit every student, and it might not actually be worth it to recruit some of the worse ones, but if you wanted to you have more than enough resources to do so. The opportunity cost for recruiting is only significant for the first few chapters.

Also, Ferdinand is not difficult to recruit. Byleth ends up with more than enough free activity points to hit the weapon ranks that you need if you explore frequently, and Armor is a very desirable skill to train. Even if you didn't want to recruit Ferdinand, you will likely be spending spare points there anyways.

It takes 9 faculty training sessions to hit D+ armor (-1 for each two greats you get), which you can definitely spare. If you didn't start working on Armor until Ch 6 and tutor twice each explore, then you should already fill 8/9 sessions you need to hit D+. D+ is also the requirement it takes to recruit Ferdinand via stats (at C+ support), so recruitment in Ch 7 is quite realistic.

Even if you hold off on recruiting Ferdinand, he doesn't get any worse, since his default training is in two good skills and his autoleveled growth bonuses are good. It's very easy to hit C by the time you hit the timeskip (and as mentioned before this is a weapon rank you actively want to hit), meaning it is well within the realm of possibility to recruit Ferdinand anywhere between Ch 7 and Ch 12 without going out of your way at all.

Never really said it was difficult to recruit every single student, I'm just saying it's not efficient to do a full recruitment. Since full recruitment implies recruiting Ferdie/Caspar, and also recruiting units just to have and not use them. Full recruitment on Maddening just gives you flex points.

Yeah it's not difficult to recruit Ferdinand (i've done it before) but, it's still again not efficient to recruit him. You could be spending those activity points to raise Armor (honestly, not even desirable to get Weight -3 if you go Falco/EO Byleth which are the most common Byleths on Maddening) when you could do them on meals, cooking, tournaments or tea time for charm. There are better uses to spend activity points on, and if you do plan on spending them on faculty, you might as well be spending those points on skills Byleth will use (considering this is a Maddening mode recruitment tier list after all).

Also Ferdinand doesn't have a C+ support lol.  Plus yeah, you do have to go out of your way to recruit Ferdinand if you have to waste points on a less than ideal skill since 9 activity points (amount is higher since Ferdinand's C+ support doesn't exist) is a pretty significant amount of time wasted, once again, because there are units  who do similar things to him but have easier recruitment.

13 minutes ago, Burklight said:

What? Sylvain is easily one of the best paralogues to do, especially on maddening. Early Lance of Ruin, Energy Drop, Speedwing. You cant cheese his paralogue in one turn with warp+stride like a few of the other ones, but it gives you a huge amount of early game benefit in a mode where that's the hardest part of the game.

You can get LoR early anyways by declining Rhea's offer after Miklan's chapter. Stat boosters is a fair argument but, there's also the flipside argument where it isn't worth doing since you can just RNG the greenhouse anyways.

Edited October 10, 2019 by Lunarly

[salinea]

12 minutes ago, Lunarly said:

Also Ferdinand doesn't have a C+ support lol.

Even if there's not a specific support conversation at + level, the game does keep track of a midway point between C and B support, which matters for recruitment threshold points. Which you can even check up on to via the restaurant menu. (Unless not having a C+ is specific to Ferdinand and his B being limited to post timeskip).

Edited October 10, 2019 by salinea

[Cysx]

38 minutes ago, Silly said:

I think you're really overestimating how difficult it is to recruit students. It's not super hard to do full recruitment even of efficiency. Just explore a lot, plant flowers at every opportunity (something you should be doing anyways), and buy the cheap gifts every month.

To be fair, I do think establishing that the player will save scum their way through B rank recruitment for more than a couple students would be a consequence of unreasonable expectations. On a tutoring week with loading taken into account, every attempt takes I'd say around 2 minutes, and the odds aren't good.
Unless I've been doing it incorrectly or something.

Edited October 10, 2019 by Cysx

[Wuzzy]

4 minutes ago, salinea said:

Even if there's not a specific support conversation at + level, the game does keep track of a midway point between C and B support, which matters for recruiting threshold points. Which you can even check up on to via the restaurant menu. (Unless not having a C+ is specific to Ferdinand and his B being limited to post timeskip).

I personally did not know that, and what is the restaurant menu you mentioned? He still does gain support points, just that the B support is locked out. Never tried to recruit him as soon as I believed he reached C+ support since I've always recruited him at C Armor/C Support.

Edited October 10, 2019 by Lunarly

[salinea]

9 minutes ago, Lunarly said:

I personally did not know that, and what is the restaurant menu you mentioned? He still does gain support points, just that the B support is locked out. Never tried to recruit him as soon as I believed he reached C+ support since I've always recruited him at C Armor/C Support.

Basically go to the dining hall to see the meals you can share with two people (you need to still have activity point of course), and then click on the button to see support level: they actually tell you here if a support level is at a "+" point.

Info from here (in other notes):

I've already used it for several recruitments.

Edited October 10, 2019 by salinea

[Silly]

There are not very many good ways to spend activity points, so you will often have a good number of points to spare on faculty training.

• Cooking is extremely good but is limited to once per explore.
• Arena is fairly good post-timeskip, but its rewards are less significant pre-timeskip. It does give you good professor exp if you want that though. I usually only do this if I have extra points to spare.
• Eating is pretty pointless past the first half of the pre-timeskip due to how easily obtainable gifts are.
• Cathedral gives such little bonuses that it's not super important to do.
• +1 Charm from tea time is a very negligible increase in stats, and isn't that relevant except on Byleth who can stack it many times. But Byleth should already have a ton of charm because you get a free tea time every birthday.

With some reasonable professor level optimization, it's very realistic that by the time the timeskip happens Byleth has Wyvern Lord requirements + B Authority + C Armor + C Bows, or possibly better.

Just now, Cysx said:

To be fair, I do think establishing that the player will save scum their way through B rank recruitment for more than a couple students is an unreasonable expectation. On a tutoring week with loading taken into account, every attempt takes I'd say around 2 minutes, and the odds aren't good.
Unless I've been doing it incorrectly or something.

If you want to, you can savescum for the students you particularly care about to ensure you recruit them at the optimal time. But the other students you can just boost their rank to B when you have spare gifts and then just let them eventually come to you. You might not recruit them this month but you have plenty of time to do so.

It helps that a fair number of students that you probably care about recruiting have requirements that Wyvern Byleth will probably meet at some point naturally, so you don't need to rely on RNG at all to recruit them. Ferdinand, Ingrid, Sylvain (for female Byleth), Mercedes, Hilda, and Leonie are all good units that should be close to zero opportunity cost to recruit via weapon ranks.

[Cysx]

19 minutes ago, Silly said:

There are not very many good ways to spend activity points, so you will often have a good number of points to spare on faculty training.

• Cooking is extremely good but is limited to once per explore.
• Arena is fairly good post-timeskip, but its rewards are less significant pre-timeskip. It does give you good professor exp if you want that though. I usually only do this if I have extra points to spare.
• Eating is pretty pointless past the first half of the pre-timeskip due to how easily obtainable gifts are.
• Cathedral gives such little bonuses that it's not super important to do.
• +1 Charm from tea time is a very negligible increase in stats, and isn't that relevant except on Byleth who can stack it many times. But Byleth should already have a ton of charm because you get a free tea time every birthday.

With some reasonable professor level optimization, it's very realistic that by the time the timeskip happens Byleth has Wyvern Lord requirements + B Authority + C Armor + C Bows, or possibly better.

If you want to, you can savescum for the students you particularly care about to ensure you recruit them at the optimal time. But the other students you can just boost their rank to B when you have spare gifts and then just let them eventually come to you. You might not recruit them this month but you have plenty of time to do so. 

It helps that a fair number of students that you probably care about recruiting have requirements that Wyvern Byleth will probably meet at some point naturally, so you don't need to rely on RNG at all to recruit them. Ferdinand, Ingrid, Sylvain (for female Byleth), Mercedes, Hilda, and Leonie are all good units that should be close to zero opportunity cost to recruit via weapon ranks.

To be honest, letting the students come to you doesn't seem like that good an idea, on average. You're decently likely to never get some, and you probably went for them for a reason, thus having no control over their join time is impractical.

Also I don't think one can get ranks much better than what you've displayed. That should take roughly 140 activity points without accounting for great results or battle. If you do nothing but faculty training the moment it's unlocked, I'd say you a generous estimation would be around... 140 sessions of it, until the timeskip. So it's not the absolute limit, but pretty close.
That being said I don't really see a reason not to do it either, apart from gimping the amount of students you can tutor early on. But if you're low manning in the first place...

That being said, am I right to assume you didn't recruit many people in that playthrough? Keeping 5+ students at full motivation + obtaining supports only through gifts... that doesn't sound possible.

[Silly]

I recruited the majority of the students, through a mix of weapon ranks and supports. I kept everyone at full motivation. I also hit A+ professor level in Ch 10 I believe.

Keep in mind that Byleth basically doesn't need to train Authority, since he/she will likely be fighting a lot and gains increased authority per battle due to proficiency.

A fair amount of your flying/axe rank will also come from fighting. In this aspect female Byleth has an advantage because as soon as you reclass into Pegasus Knight you will start getting 4 flying wexp every battle, which means you don't have to train flying as much as male Byleth does.

Also, you will generally have spare activity points every day. The number of students that you need to keep motivated scales with your prof level, but so does the amount of activity points you have to eat meals. (Even ignoring the fact that you will probably stop eating meals after a certain point).

At D rank you have 1 spare activity point. D+ rank you have 2, C rank you have 2.5, C+ you have 3.5, B you have 4.

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General tutoring path is:

When faculty tutoring unlocks, train flying + lance with all your spare activity points, with the goal of hitting D flying, D+ lance (minimum requirements to reclass in the Pegasus Knight). Requires 14 tutoring sessions max, but will realistically be less since you can occasionally get greats when tutoring, and you're presumably doing some fighting with a lance.

Let's say you hit level 10 and are aiming to promote somewhere around the end of Ch 5. This gives you 10 weekends worth of activities after tutoring is unlocked. Say you battle on three weekends, leaving 7 explore sessions. At most you will need to tutor twice each week to hit this (you have the spare points to do this starting at D+ professor level), but some of the earlier weeks you can probably tutor once and still hit the requirements.

The next breakpoint we need to hit is C Axe, C Flying, which is the minimum requirement to promote to Wyvern Rider. This requires 500 wexp to hit, which is at worst 25 sessions. This is actually quite substantial, but keep in mind that we are a Pegasus Knight by this point, meaning that every five battles with any weapon will automatically shave off one tutoring session from our requirement. Fighting with an axe will also shave a little bit of the requirement, but it takes 10 battles with an axe to shave off one tutoring session.

Let's say that level 20 happens before the end of Ch 9 (which is reasonable for a slower run but is probably too early for a LTC or super efficient run). This gives us another 14 weeks to hit requirements. You're probably at least C professor level by this time so you likely have 3+ spare activity points, but let's say we start throwing in cooking at this point. That still gives us a minimum of 28 tutoring sessions that can be spent contributing towards our weapon ranks. It's probably realistic to assume that we can contribute ~20ish tutoring sessions towards our Wyvern weapon ranks and throw the remaining points towards either Bows or Heavy Armor, which would be enough to get one of these ranks up to D+.

The rest of the pre-timeskip dates comprises of 9 more free weeks. At this point I think it would be reasonable to assume that you're at B or higher professor level (I had personally hit A+ by now). This is also past the time where it is realistic to have transitioned over to primarily using gifts to raise motivation. This means that you have at minimum 6 spare activity points after cooking, which gives you a potential 54 tutoring sessions over 9 weeks, but you will likely have more since I'm just assuming B professor level. For example, having A professor level at this point gives 72 spare actions.

For reference, your promotion target is likely to be something like C Lance, B+ Axe, B Flying. You can also probably hit C Armor and C Bows with your spare activity points. Getting to C in both Armor and Bows (from the ~D+ rank you had before in one) takes roughly 21 sessions. Bumping Lance up to C requires an additional 6 sessions. Flying up to B takes 19, and Axe up to B+ takes 33. This is a total of 58 sessions maximum for your core weapon ranks and 79 sessions if you want your auxiliary ranks (armor and bow) as well.

Keep in mind though that every four combats that you enter as a Wyvern Rider shaves both one session off both your flying and your axe requirements, and at this point it is possible that Byleth can be using the Knowledge Gem, which means that every combat you enter is the equivalent of a faculty training session in terms of total wexp gained. As always, these requirements are also reduced by getting greats.

The numbers above are rough estimates. The slower you go (and the more fighting you do) the laxer they become, because you are getting more and more weapon exp from combat.

[arem]

11 hours ago, Silly said:

Shamir's best trait is her really good early damage. She starts with 18 Str and Bowfaire, and due to her base A bow rank she will likely be the only unit you have that can use a Silver Bow for a while. She also has the Lance rank to easily go into Pegasus Knight if you want to trade damage for mobility.

Her growths aren't the best though, being below average in both speed and strength, and her base speed of 14 is okay but not incredible for this point in time. I found that she was often missing out on doubling as result, which made her a useful midgame unit but not spectacular. I assume that with a few stat boosters fixing her speed she would be able to remain useful for the entire game (or at least most of it), or alternatively you can keep her in Sniper forever for Hunter's Volley, which would also solve her speed issues (at the cost of only having 5 move).

Shamir is an excellent sniper and probably should be kept as such.  I am too lazy too look up the averages right now, but my Shamir ended up with 16 speed wielding a killer bow on my blue lions run.  Force feeding her speed carrots probably would not have been able to fix even if was not giving my stat up to other units and she was a pretty crappy bow knight.  As  sniper, however, she was volleying for two Shots at 80 to 100 crit and could hit things four spaces away.  That's basically lysithea level combat.  You can do better, but considering she cost me nothing important resource wise that is a pretty sweet deal.

[Silly]

1 hour ago, arem said:

Shamir is an excellent sniper and probably should be kept as such.  I am too lazy too look up the averages right now, but my Shamir ended up with 16 speed wielding a killer bow on my blue lions run.  Force feeding her speed carrots probably would not have been able to fix even if was not giving my stat up to other units and she was a pretty crappy bow knight.  As  sniper, however, she was volleying for two Shots at 80 to 100 crit and could hit things four spaces away.  That's basically lysithea level combat.  You can do better, but considering she cost me nothing important resource wise that is a pretty sweet deal.

Assuming you recruit as early as possible, Shamir averages 16 speed at level 16. The later you recruit her the worse her speed is, since she doesn't really gain any speed via autolevels.

Edited October 11, 2019 by Silly

[Shanty Pete's 1st Mate]

21 hours ago, Lunarly said:

Definitely 100% disagree on this notion, a recruitment tier list should 100% take this into consideration, considering quite a few units (SS route Hilda, Ashe, and Lorenz come to mind) are recruited either for their paralogue items or battalions. You might as well just call this a regular tier list (which only considers a unit's performance exclusively) and not a recruitment tier list, and there's already a thread for that.

Also re: Hilda, her performance in SS route is pretty poor due to her late join time, which imo should also be taken into consideration with her ranking, in addition to her great performance in BL route.

Seconding this.

If this isn't a tierlist of "which units should I make an effort to recruit", then what's even the point of it? If recruiting everyone is a given, and assumed to have no opportunity cost, then they should all sit in the same tier as one another.

I would construct the tiers based off of, "building from my base house, which recruitments bring me the most?" Put another way, if I'm limiting myself to, say, 4 recruits, which would be the best 4 to pick? Such that the top 4 form an S-tier, the next 4 (or 3, or 5, the count is arbitrary) make up A-tier, and so on.

Under such guidelines, I would assign the following (rough) rankings:

S: Lorenz, Sylvain, Catherine*, Shamir

A: Ingrid, Felix, Ferdinand, Hilda*, Lysithea

B: Annette, Petra, Linhardt, Leonie, Marianne, Dorothea

C :Manuela, Ignatz, Mercedes, Bernadetta, Ashe, Caspar

D :Raphael, Alois, Cyril*, Catherine^, Hilda^, Hanneman

E: Cyril^

Where ^ refers to the Silver Snow variant, and * refers to other recruitable variants, of each respective unit.

Anyway, this is really rough and mostly theory-crafting. Still have to play BL and SS, and beat anything on Maddening.

[Dark Holy Elf]

On 10/9/2019 at 5:51 PM, Shiki said:

Dorothea suffers a lot from the recruitment mechanic because her preferred skills are Swords and Reason. Aka she stars with E Faith. Despite having a budding Talent that weakness in Faith makes it a lot harder to get Physics access early on which is why she is an entire tier below the other two.

This isn't true, she joined with D faith and Heal unlocked when I grabbed her in... I believe Chapter 5 on my most recent run. Not sure how the game decides this because it isn't one of her preferred skills normally, but it definitely happened.

[XeKr]

That’s because crossrecruit/mission assist units get weapon rank corresponding to the requirements of the class they’re in. So monks have minimum D reason and faith starting at lvl 5 by chapter 3 (but units that go into Mage like Annette, Lysithea, and probably Dorothea will lose D faith as soon as they hit lvl 11 by chapter 6). You can also see stuff like Fighter Bernie with D Axes and Brawling even though she has deficiencies in those skills. Shamir gets A bows, Cath gets A swords, etc.
_____________________

I don’t have too many thoughts on the list in general at this time, except that there are still pretty significant differences per route, for example cross Lysithea isn’t as great in BL as Warp doesn’t improve efficiency that much in a route with DotG. Also her biggest advantage which is early warp is lessened, because c5 warp is probably not happening and Shamir can 1 turn c6. Other warpers are available later and the marginal utility of additional warps is less. And again DotG is a big deal in BL, and between stride, dance, and smite you don't actually need that much warp range (a number of strats are doable with just bishop base and some don't require warp at all) to efficiently clear chapters.

Edited October 11, 2019 by XeKr

[Dark Holy Elf]

3 minutes ago, XeKr said:

That’s because units get weapon rank corresponding to the requirements of the class they’re in. So monks have minimum D reason and faith starting at lvl 5 (but units that go into Mage like Annette, Lysithea, and probably Dorothea will lose D faith as soon as they hit lvl 11). You can also see stuff like Fighter Bernie with D Axes and Brawling even though she has deficiencies in those skills. Shamir gets A bows, Cath gets A swords, etc.

Oh neat, good to have that mystery solved. A bit surprising that Monk/Fighter give all their D ranks.

[Cysx]

7 hours ago, Silly said:

snip

All right, thanks for the explanation. I was a bit more systematic with my approach but we had reached similar results.
The part where you stop meals entirely is where I don't follow, though. Keeping, say, six students motivated takes 24 motivation. While there are monthly gifts, supports, the monthly professor question to consider, and the odd student likes some of the flowers you're getting, that's still a lot to keep up on a, say 10 flowers/per week yield, even though in my experience that's optimistic. And then you have a surplus for support grinding?
While end of month weekends can compensate, they're generally used to run paralogues. Which are proportional in amount to your recruitments in the first place, but yeah. That is not necessarily a slight however, it shouldn't make things impossible; however to me it still feels like eating one or two meals per week is warranted in that regard. Also I'd definitely advise cooking from the get-go, the first chapters are when the bonus makes the biggest difference. It can be challenging getting the fish but it's worth it.

Also Month 8 only has 3 weekends despite having 3 tutoring sessions. Not nitpicking because it doesn't really change anything, it's just easy to forget

[Silly]

If you mostly keep students motivated through food for the first half of the pre-timeskip, you end up building up a lot of free stuff that you can give them to keep students happy.

You have flowers every week (which you should basically exclusively be planting), you have buyable gifts (you can at the very least buy the cheap ones), you have lost items, and you have gifts that you get for completing quests. Also a few other random mechanics that incidentally boost motivation.

Later on post-timeskip, you can go back to eating if you really want to (say you ran out of gifts to sustain keeping everyone happy). By this point Byleth should have more than enough activity points, and nothing important to spend faculty training on, so you have a ton of free time to do whatever you want.

[Vitezen]

Why is Raphael so low on maddening when people praise Dedue so much for his early game? It seems like a reasonable idea to recruit Raphael early on BE to be your tank, or to have a second tank in BL.

[Silly]

17 minutes ago, Vitezen said:

Why is Raphael so low on maddening when people praise Dedue so much for his early game? It seems like a reasonable idea to recruit Raphael early on BE to be your tank, or to have a second tank in BL.

Because base Raphael has 7 defense whereas base Dedue can have up to 12 defense due to his personal.

Raphael isn't actually that much tankier your other students. He only has +1 defense over Ferdinand and Sylvain, and actually ties in base defense with Leonie. Except Ferdinand/Sylvain/Leonie have many other traits that are more valuable.

On the other hand, Dedue's +5/6 defense lead over your other students at base is huge. He is likely the only unit you have in the first few chapters that can live through multiple rounds of combat in enemy phase. When you're still at the point in the game where you get doubled by everything, Dedue's +5 defense lead means that Raphael is potentially taking 10 extra damage per combat, which is a huge amount given that HP bars are at most in their low 30s.

[Tombstone88]

A question: Does this take into account the recruitment differences of the various routes?  By that, I mean how certain characters (Hilda, Catherine, etc.) cannot be recruited at all/until very late on certain routes (mainly Black Eagles).  There is a significant enough difference between, say, Blue Lions Hilda and Silver Snow Hilda to warrant 2 separate placements, IMO.

[Wuzzy]

Think if I did a recruitment tier list (with items/paralogues factored in, not ordered) mine would be like...

S - Catherine, Lysithea, Lorenz, Sylvain

A - Felix, Petra, Ingrid, Hilda (BL), Shamir

B - Leonie, Ashe (SS/CF), Linhardt, Annette, Mercedes, Ignatz (SS/CF)

C - Marianne, Hanneman, Manuela, Ignatz (BL), Raphael (SS/CF)

D - Dorothea, Bernadetta, Alois, Cyril (BL/GD), Ashe (GD), Ferdinand, Catherine (SS), Hilda (SS), Caspar

E - Raphael (BL), Cyril (SS)

 If performance is the only thing we're looking at then everything pretty stays the same except Ashe and Lorenz would fall to D.

Edited October 12, 2019 by Lunarly

[LegendOfLoog]

2 hours ago, Lunarly said:

Think if I did a recruitment tier list (with items/paralogues factored in, not ordered) mine would be like...

 S - Catherine, Lysithea, Lorenz, Sylvain

A - Felix, Petra, Ingrid, Hilda (BL), Shamir

B - Leonie, Ashe (SS/CF), Linhardt, Annette, Mercedes, Ignatz (SS/CF), Raphael (SS/CF)

C - Marianne, Hanneman, Manuela, Ignatz (BL)

D - Dorothea, Bernadetta, Alois, Cyril (BL/GD), Ashe (GD), Ferdinand, Catherine (SS), Hilda (SS)

E - Raphael (BL), Caspar, Cyril (SS)

 If performance is the only thing we're looking at then everything pretty stays the same except Ashe and Lorenz would fall to D.

I agree with most of the list, but what's the difference between Raphael in SS/CF and BL? I can't think of anything that would justify a three tier difference, and out of the two placements, E is pretty fair to his general contribution as a combat unit. Also, why is Ferdinand so low in comparison to Sylvain? They're very close statistically, and they both fill the Swift Strikes niche. If items and paralogues are factored in, Sylvain should be higher for giving the Lance of Ruin. But assuming that he didn't, would it really be accurate to put Sylvain below Hanneman and Marianne? Since that's essentially Ferdinand, he should at least be B rank imo. And if we're considering Paralogue rewards, Caspar should be higher too imo. The Rafail Gem is probably one of the best equippables in the game: Aegis/Pavise without needing the corresponding Crest, negates Crits, nullifies all movement-type weaknesses, and is 0 Weight. For that alone, he's significantly better than Raphael and Cyril in SS. 

[arem]

On 10/10/2019 at 10:15 PM, Silly said:

Assuming you recruit as early as possible, Shamir averages 16 speed at level 16. The later you recruit her the worse her speed is, since she doesn't really gain any speed via autolevels.

Wow, I just checked the save, and she has 23 speed at level 38.  She got absolutely cursed.  And yet still one of my best killers.  This may be explaining why I found Oath of the Dagger so hard...

As for Dedue, he shows off how much defense can snowball if built correctly.  He starts with twelve with his personal, which is way beyond everyone else, but not game breaking by itself.  But put him on a tree he is at thirteen. Survive the first mock battle (which sucks, but is still easier with the blue lions thanks mostly to him), and you can pick up an iron shield.  That brings him up to 15. Do Jeralt's fetch quest  and give Dedue the Church of Seiros soldiers battalion.  That brings him to sixteen, but after you level the batalion up he is at 18.  I don't have an early game save handy, but I am pretty sure that is high enough that the sword thieves won't be able to hurt him and the archers will only be able to hurt him with poison.  And he has a coin flip chance of getting even more defense with every level up.  Its more than just surviving multiple rounds of battle, I frequently left him in a bush or something and let four enemies tink off his armor while the rest of my group did something else.  Raphael, by contrast, is at thirteen if you take the same steps, the same as Dedue was when he started.  

Edited October 12, 2019 by arem
clarity

[Vitezen]

snip

Edited October 12, 2019 by Vitezen

[Wuzzy]

1 hour ago, LegendOfLoog said:

I agree with most of the list, but what's the difference between Raphael in SS/CF and BL? I can't think of anything that would justify a three tier difference, and out of the two placements, E is pretty fair to his general contribution as a combat unit. Also, why is Ferdinand so low in comparison to Sylvain? They're very close statistically, and they both fill the Swift Strikes niche. If items and paralogues are factored in, Sylvain should be higher for giving the Lance of Ruin. But assuming that he didn't, would it really be accurate to put Sylvain below Hanneman and Marianne? Since that's essentially Ferdinand, he should at least be B rank imo. And if we're considering Paralogue rewards, Caspar should be higher too imo. The Rafail Gem is probably one of the best equippables in the game: Aegis/Pavise without needing the corresponding Crest, negates Crits, nullifies all movement-type weaknesses, and is 0 Weight. For that alone, he's significantly better than Raphael and Cyril in SS. 

Raphael's niche is mainly for Rally Str and his bulk (additional bulky units are nice to have in BE house, so you don't have to rely on Edelgard/Byleth/Ferdie, and Ferdie does take a bit to get going). Raphael isn't necessary in BL just because of Annette and Dedue being able to do what Raphael does but better since I wanted to make that distinction. Ferdinand is low not because his performance sucks but, mainly because his recruitment is out of the way (which is subjective in this thread and that's fine) since his B support is part 2 locked, and that there are other units that can be recruited an easier but perform similarly ish. But yeah, Ferdinand is a great unit, just I don't see him as a good cross-recruit. Getting C-Ranked armor is pretty easy but, Weight -3 isn't too significant for Byleth (never really felt Weight -3 made a difference on my Wyvern Lord Byleth due to Darting Blow, since I did do a full-recruit for BL house) which is why it is out of the way. Hmmm the Caspar argument is speaking to me, I'll definitely raise him since I quite like Rafail Gem (though I know many who don't) but, his inconvenient recruitment probs still put him at D-Rank for me at best.

Edited October 12, 2019 by Lunarly

[LegendOfLoog]

1 hour ago, Lunarly said:

Raphael's niche is mainly for Rally Str and his bulk (additional bulky units are nice to have in BE house, so you don't have to rely on Edelgard/Byleth/Ferdie, and Ferdie does take a bit to get going). Raphael isn't necessary in BL just because of Annette and Dedue being able to do what Raphael does but better since I wanted to make that distinction. Ferdinand is low not because his performance sucks but, mainly because his recruitment is out of the way (which is subjective in this thread and that's fine) since his B support is part 2 locked, and that there are other units that can be recruited an easier but perform similarly ish. But yeah, Ferdinand is a great unit, just I don't see him as a good cross-recruit. Getting C-Ranked armor is pretty easy but, Weight -3 isn't too significant for Byleth (never really felt Weight -3 made a difference on my Wyvern Lord Byleth due to Darting Blow, since I did do a full-recruit for BL house) which is why it is out of the way. Hmmm the Caspar argument is speaking to me, I'll definitely raise him since I quite like Rafail Gem (though I know many who don't) but, his inconvenient recruitment probs still put him at D-Rank for me at best.

Ah, I see what you mean. Since BE lacks Rally Strength or a proper tank, it makes sense that Raphael would be a bit more helpful there. In all honesty, he probably is significantly better as a Recruit than in-house for sure; he gets that +15% Strength and +20% Speed growth from enemy Brawler growths, so that may help salvage his speed to an extent (15% -> 35%). The main issue that I see with Raph is that he doesn't actually feel very bulky to me. Even with Brawler growths, I don't think that's enough to avoid being doubled by most enemies which really reduces his tanking capability. Assuming he goes to Level 20 unrecruited, he should have 46.6(+1) HP, 22.5(+1) Str, 10.85(+2) Spd, and 16.55 Def. In Ferdinand's case, at Level 20 unrecruited he has 40(+1) HP, 18.55(+1) Str, 17.5(-1 mounted) Spd, and 14.15(+1) Def. This isn't really meant to show much except that his bulk is deceptively low because of how frequently he's doubled in comparison to other somewhat tanky units (Sylvain, Leonie, and Ferdinand, to name a few). He's mostly left with Rally Strength, and I don't particularly think that alone is worth a deployment slot. Raph is certainly better in BE in comparison to BL, but the difference isn't that large imo. 

I think Weight -3 has its uses later on in reducing the Weight of heavy weapons like certain Axes, but it's definitely more useful early. It's certainly more annoying to get Heavy Armor for any Byleth investing into Axes though since it's likely that Gilbert and Alois will be busy tutoring that instead of Heavy Armor. It's a bit of a toss-up, but I think that even with the roadblock in his recruitment, Ferdinand is still probably on par with Raphael's performance at least. Caspar at D sounds fair, though; he's still fairly meh as a unit, even with Recruit bonuses. 

Edited October 12, 2019 by LegendOfLoog