screenshots A Grindy Crimson Flower Playthrough, Three Houses.

[DehNutCase]

Came into a bit of free time recently, so going to play some more Fire Emblem. This LP will be a little like my Conquest LP, which you can find here, but I'm going to be doing as many Paralogues as I can rather than skipping the vast majority of them, meaning the difficulty will probably get tossed out the window around the time Byleth hits level 20.

Oh, and I'll also be playing way more sloppy, since I can get away with it in Three Houses. Reset Counter: 2 (Yeah, I had to reset twice to beat the prologue, LUL)

 

Table Of Contents:

1, Prologue

2, Chapter 1

3, Chapter 2: Part 1  Part 2

4, Chapter 3

5, Chapter 4 (Ignore the fact that it says Chapter 3 on the post itself, sorry.)

6, Chapter 5: Part 1  Part 2

7, Chapter 6

8, Chapter 7: Part 1: Ingrid's Paralogue and Sylvain's Paralogue  Part 2

9, Chapter 8: Part 1: Lorenz's Paralogue and Sothis's Paralogue  Part 2

10, Chapter 9: Part 1: Hanneman's Paralogue and Flayn's Paralogue  Part 2: Ashe's Paralogue  Part 3

11, Chapter 10: Part 1: Felix's Paralogue  Part 2

12, Chapter 11: Part 1: Shamir's Paralogue  Part 2: Raphael's Paralogue Part 3

13, Chapter 12

14, Chapter 13: Academy and Timeskip-Levelup Analysis  The Map  Extra: More Notes on Timeskip-Levelups

15, Chapter 14: Academy  Map (Ignore what the post says, it's Chapter 14, not 15)

16, Chapter 15: First Academy Session  Insurmountable (Edelgard's Paralogue)  Foreign Land and Sky (Petra and Bernadetta's Paralogue)  Rare Monster Sighting & 2nd Academy Session  Protecting Garreg Mach (Story Mission)

17, Chapter 16: First Academy Session  

 

(Open the Spoiler to see the update.)

Spoiler

 

Pre-Run Planning:

I have a save file already from a finished run of Crimson Flower, but I'm going to play without New Game+ for this run---if I ever do the other routes I'll be using New Game+, using this playthrough's save, but that's an if, not a when.

Don't have a screenshot for me selecting Classic, for some reason, but eh.

Byleth will be Byleth either gender (more on their bases later), but females get Pegasus Knight. You also recruit Sylvain for free as a female, if you care about him.

My impression after one run of Three Houses is that Female Byleth is probably one or two tiers above everyone else, including male Byleth.

Don't mess with perfection.

Having your birthday just after April means that you'll get your birthday present really early. It's a +2 Charm ring, not very important in the grand scheme of things, but it's nice to have around early game, since everyone's gambits have accuracy issues early.

Yeah I should've set Byleth's birthday to be in May, but it's not a big enough issue to matter.

Pre-Map Planning:

The prologue is trivial if you don't play greedy. (I almost always play greedy, hence why I somehow lost this map twice.) Note that this isn't the actual pre-battle Map, I forgot to screenshot the pre-battle Map for some reason.

Our Mooks:

Nothing to complain about in Byleth's Bases, even the brawling proficiency is useful if you're not into face-tanking people without an weapon equipped. (You'll be doing that annoying often the first few maps, until you eat enough carrots.)

Remember, 3 20% exp boosts equals a Paragon's 100% exp boost, because math. (It takes 2.5 levels of exp to level up 3 units once, one of whom has Paragon---1 level each for the mooks, and half a level for the Paragon guy. It takes 2.5 levels of exp to level up 3 units once, each of whom has a 20% exp boost---it takes 1/1.2 = .83 levels each, and 3 * .83 = 2.5.)

Note that this works on adjacent allies in addition to Byleth herself.

Nothing to complain about here, either, except the fact that Dimitri isn't Female. (Pegasus Knight is stupid good, more on the class later.)

Before part 2 the house Leaders just have Corrin's Nobility.

Not female, and also arguably the worst bases of our mooks this map.

There's really only two reasons that Edelgard isn't as good as female Byleth, availability (she goes AWOL a few maps) and the fact that Byleth secretly has like 200% Charm growth thanks to all the tea parties she can throw. Charm is pretty damn important if you're trying to solo carry maps.

Note that Edelgard's bases are actually even better than they look, and they'll look pretty amazing once we start seeing non-House Leader bases. She picks up Armor Knight for free at level 10 thanks to her D rank Axes and Heavy Armor, which gives her 12 Defense guaranteed at level 10.

 

Ally Mooks:

These are what amazing bases look like, unfortunately, Jeralt will never, ever, be in our team. You can't see it right now, but he has 8 move, or double the mobility of our sorry (relatively speaking) lineup.

Note that debuffs aren't nearly as strong as in Conquest, they only last for one turn, and debuffs on enemy units are cleared when the Player Phase starts. This is still an amazing personal skill, though.

 

Enemy Mooks:

Note that you only need a 4 AS (Attack Speed) advantage to double people in three houses. Bear in mind that Edelgard has 3 AS when she's using an axe. (Easy fix, though, just give her Byleth's sword or Dimitri's lance.)

For some reason, Axe mooks get 1 Str and 1 Dex for free compared to Sword mooks.

Pretty strong, but everyone on our team hits like trucks so if you're playing safe he goes down in one Player Phase.

Again, I managed to lose twice on this map, LUL.

 

The Map:

I'll show off the combat arts the first time I use them, note the 30 Hit increase and the 2-3 range. Curved Shot is lowkey amazing.

You don't really need 100% hit rates for very high reliability, anything above 80% is more or less fine. Three Houses uses a two-roll system.

Only 10 extra hit, which is disappointing, but at least Wrath Strike gives 5 extra damage.

We only have a set amount of healing items for the first two maps, but a lot of weapon uses, so feel free to go wild on Combat Arts.

Trading Dimitri's stuff to Edelgard, since this is a Crimson Flower run. (You keep everything in your convoy, on Byleth, and on your House Leader after this map, so it's a good idea to shuffle stuff before you clear the map for two extra weapons and vulneraries.)

End of turn one. Kind of miss the small DS screenshots so I can have these two side by side.

End of turn two.

Axe proficiency doesn't give nearly as much avoid as Sword Proficiency, so even without Wrath Strike our attack is more or less guaranteed. Note how Claude got to keep his bow, it's a free +3% accuracy thanks to this game's version of support bonuses.

No combat triangle in this game, incidentally---you do get Breaker skills to simulate the effect, but Breakers are really mediocre in this game. Strict requirements + low effect (only 20 hit/avoid) is pretty meh.

You can't always rely on what the game says the AI will do, but they're reasonably accurate. (If you're used to doing AI manipulation most of the stuff from Conquest and Heroes apply in Three Houses as well.)

End of turn 3.

Byleth tends to have skill proficiency problems unless you're on New Game+, so it's a good idea to have her take a bit more combats than your other units.

Ah yes, chugging medicine rather than using healing spells. We're such a bunch of barbarians.

End of Turn 4.

Note that I forgot to have Edelgard equip Dimitri's Lance, so she's about to take 4 times as much damage as she's supposed to. (If she's holding a lance one of the mooks would hit Byleth instead, but she isn't, so both sword mooks go for her and double her.)

-200g, basically, since that's two vulnerary uses of HP right there.

End of turn 5.

I'll be honest, Maddening is mostly about tedious micro-mangement than anything else. Shuffling inventory around so you aren't being ORKOd is like 70% of the first couple maps. Fist weapons would be quite good for getting through the early part of the game, thanks to their low weight letting you avoid doubles, but pretty much only Byleth and the House Leaders have enough STR to pull off fist weapons.

And you really want to pick up lances for the glorious reposition combat art and cavalry classes anyway.

Thanks to the two-roll system 91% is closer to 99% accuracy than 90%, so I don't bother with Wrath Strike.

-100g.

Both Claude and Dimitri will tank a hit so I can continue to feed exp to the two units that matter.

End of turn 5.

I forgot to show Smash, but it costs 5 Durability, and gives 3 damage, 20% Accuracy, 20% Crit. Expensive as hell, but it gets the job done.

I could have optimized a little by having Byleth kill the other mook first, so she's in position to provide the 20% Professor exp, but that's pretty risky if Edelgard misses the OHKO. Doing this first means I can recover by trade swapping into Iron Lance so that Edelgard avoids being ORKOd at 10 hp.

Doop.

And that's enough out of Claude, time to take his bow and Vulnerary.

Axe mooks are pretty easy to mow down, thanks to their way lower avoid relative to sword mooks.

Great level, although Speed is a tad more important than Defense right now. That said, Byleth has a harder time getting Armored Knight than her students, even compared to the ones with a double weakness in Axes and Heavy Armor, since she can't tutor herself, so I'd be quite happy if she got enough Defense naturally that I can skip trying to get Armor Knight proficiency for her.

Once there's only the boss & his immediate mooks left, he'll aggro and start running towards you. I usually play ultra-greedy here and send Byleth to fight them while standing on a bush, but that has a 25% chance or so of ending badly. And it did, hence my two resets, so I'm playing it safe this time.

End of turn 7.

-100g.

Ordinarily both mooks should hit Edelgard, but the quirk of the AI on this map is that the boss and his 2 mooks will always go for Byleth if possible, even if they have a kill on someone else.

That said, I probably should've moved Byleth up 1 square so Edelgard gets a bit more exp.

End of turn 8.

Jeralt is going to steal one of my kills on his phase, but as far as I know he never kills bosses, which is very polite of him.

It's possible, but very annoying, to get all 3 kills for this wave. (And risky.)

Giving Claude his bow back for the 3% accuracy boost.

Byleth goes to the bush for the 20% exp boost on Edelgard.

Combat Arts are very nice, but they're pretty expensive in terms of gold.

And yoink.

As you can see with the 47% accuracy, usually having Byleth tank the boss and his mooks turn out well. Usually.

I convoy the bow to Byleth so she provides Edelgard a bit of extra hit (and exp).

It's a good thing the boss drops an Iron Axe, because Edelgard's is already half-broken.

I'd like some Str, but the level has Speed, so I'll take it. (Defense level ups aren't nearly as necessary for Edelgard since she gets 12 Def regardless at level 10.)

 

Forgot to take the map end screenshot, so here's Edelgard getting an Axe instead.

 

I'll probably split the later updates into Academy Phases and Map Phases.

 

 

Edited April 2, 2020 by DehNutCase

[Parrhesia]

Spoiler tags are really useful and you should consider making use of them.

[DehNutCase]

16 minutes ago, Parrhesia said:

Spoiler tags are really useful and you should consider making use of them.

May I ask where? Do you mean in the title?

 

Or do you mean I should add a tag to the threat thread that says 'Three Houses Spoilers Inside.'

Edited December 11, 2019 by DehNutCase

[Parrhesia]

I mean that unless you put the five hundred images in every update under a

Spoiler

spoiler

the thread is very quickly gonna become too unwieldy to scroll through and load.

[DehNutCase]

5 minutes ago, Parrhesia said:

I mean that unless you put the five hundred images in every update under a

  Reveal hidden contents

spoiler

the thread is very quickly gonna become too unwieldy to scroll through and load.

Ah, I see.

I guess I'll just put each individual batch of images in its own spoiler?

 

Edit: This would've been quite useful to know for my last thread, actually, but I didn't think of it.

Edited December 11, 2019 by DehNutCase

[DehNutCase]

Tried some re-sized images, but man they're ugly, I think I'll just put full size images inside spoiler tags instead, now that I've realized it's a good idea.

Ch. 1:

Spoiler

Academy:

Maybe I should've put this bit at the end of the Prologue, but eh.

The quest is complete after talking to the Three House leaders, but talking to them lets you view some basic info about the characters in Three House. We're in the Black Eagles, so I'll show you everyone in that house, but also some of notable people in other houses.

Not much to say, a very solid 2nd best unit in this particular route, although the low base luck is annoying. Archers and Sword mooks will be seeing positive crit rates vs. Edelgard for quite a while.

Great bases, great growths, has Pegasus Knight access.

If you can spare the skill exp for it, getting Hubert Armor Knight at level 10 will fix his physical bulk forever---his base Hp and Def are garbage, but his growths are passable. Hits like a truck, has a nice set of Dark Magic spells (gets a 3-range spell extremely early), 4 move basically forever. Crimson Flower is the shortest route, so level 30 classes aren't around for too long. 

Notably, he has what I would call a 'Bond' support with Edelgard. Bond supports provide some MT in addition to the accuracy and evasion of normal supports.

Magical Gambits tend to only have 1 use per map, so Officer Duty isn't nearly as good as it would be on a physical unit.

 

Because magic has a different formula for accuracy than physical weapons, having good mages will be quite important until you get a bunch of magic weapons. (Most notably, magic ignores evasion from terrain.) If you're doing Paralogues (for the +range staves) then mages will stay good throughout the game, trading mobility for attack range, but otherwise you should probably think long and hard about how much value an offensive mage is giving you compared to, say, a Levin Sword+ Pegasus Knight.

Not quite House Leader tier in terms of bases, but not bad at all, growths are decent across the board too. You can make him into an Avoid tank pretty easily thanks to Confidence, but not much reason to when Edelgard and female Byleth exist. 15% accuracy for free is nothing to scoff at, however, and he picks up Seal Speed after three Heavy Armor tutoring sessions. Picks up Armor Knight at level 10 pretty easily, although it will cost you a few tutoring sessions, unlike Edelgard who gets it for free.

He learns Ward at C-rank Faith if you feel like exp grinding.

Notably, has a Bond support with Lorenz. Capped at B-rank, but all supports are capped at B-rank before part-2 or New Game+ anyway.

Basically a classic healer. 9 Res is absurdly good early on for face-tanking magic, and Catnap saves healing spells/items early on. He gets Warp later on, at A-rank Faith. Has a nice set of offensive wind spells as well, but you're better off spending the skill exp elsewhere.

If you get him thief at level 10 he'll get 11 Dex/11 Speed, but getting him Armor Knight for 30 Hp and 12 Def is also nice. It takes effort to get him both at level 10, but I tend to try.

Unlike offensive mages, about half the healers in this game get Physic really early, so their raw mobility isn't nearly as important.

Born Fighter is a hell of a personal skill, but 6 base speed is quite disappointing. There are people who would double Caspar even if he wasn't holding anything on the very next map.

I like him, but I'd like him more outside of Maddening. The early game is the hardest part and Caspar happens to be weakest early on.

Mind, as far as I can tell most units in Crimson Flower are like the units from Conquest, yeah, some of them will be miles better than everyone else, but only using the units that you like from a character perspective isn't going to gimp your run or anything, they're all more or less at least 'good enough'.

Persecution Complex is better than a flat +5 Str and +5 Mag, due to the way bases work in this game. That is, Bernadetta is better than a unit without a personal skill, but with 13 Str and 10 Mag bases. Offensively speaking, Bernadetta has House Leader tier bases.

She's not House Leader tier overall unless you manage to get her Armor Knight at level 10 (note her double weakness in Axes and Heavy Armor), but aside from her bulk she's quite capable at just about everything.

She picks up a full kit of offensive spells if you go Reason, and she picks up the Rescue + Pass combo if you go Faith. She gets Rescue at A-rank Faith, Pass after you unlock her Riding Talent. If you pick up Monk at level 5 she'll have stellar magic weapon offenses for the rest of the game (Monks have 8 Mag, 4 Res bases). If you keep her in bows she picks up Encloser, a bow Combat Art that prevents movement---which prevents even monster movement, unlike Gambits.

 

If it wasn't for the fact that she doesn't really get going until after level 10 she'd be a contender for 2nd place, as is Edelgard is still significantly better, even with going AWOL for a few maps. If you only look at her growths then they're on the 'acceptable' end rather than the 'great' end, but growths are for people without House Leader tier bases.

Only has 40% speed growths, like Edelgard and Linhardt, making the three of them the slowest units in the Black Eagles, but Sword Proficiency means she's guaranteed 11 Dex, 11 Speed at level 10. Charm of 8 means that, as far as I know, she can win the Dance Contest with just her level 1 bases.

Her Faith hidden talent is a lie---her only offensive Faith spell is Nosferatu. Like Hubert, she picks up a 3-range spell extremely early. Picks up some really nasty stuff like Meteor later on in Reason, too.

Notably, has a Bond support with Manuela.

 

Just like Hubert, suffers from the 4-move problem of offensive spell casters. Dancers have 6 move and magic access, so you can give that to one of them to fix mobility issues, but you only get one Dancer.

Hunter's Boon is basically useless, but Petra's raw bases and growths are more than enough to make up for it. I'd much rather have Felix's +5 damage without a Battalion to give her the early edge to carry the team to the mid-game, but eh. Bulk is a tad lacking, but Armor Knight is trivial to pickup for someone with an Axe strength.

 

My main issue with Petra is that her payoff is just another generic 'good unit.' Great unit, even. Nothing wrong with being generically good or great, but she has nothing on the level of Encloser, Rescue, Warp, Meteor, etc. Broadly speaking, all she offers is combat that's a few levels ahead of an 'average' unit. Having her in the team won't give you any options the team doesn't already have. Whereas, for example, Encloser would mean you can trade one unit-turn a turn to keep a mook or Monster occupied forever.

She's the kind of unit that I'll almost always bring if I have a lot of free deployment slots, but also among the first units I'd cut if deployment slots are an issue, since I'd need to bring more critical units first. Take the next map, for example. You have 5 deployment slots, and 2 units are forced, so between three units you need to cover all your bases. Between things you might want like 'magical damage' or 'healers' or 'poke'* or 'crowd control' it's hard to justify a unit whose only draw is 'better than average combat.' 

*The ability to hit things without being countered.

 

Note that this is a numbers issue, not a role issue, if Petra had Byleth level numbers she'd make the team anyway.

 

And that's a wrap for the Black Eagles. I'll also mention a few notables from the other houses.

I like Lorenz a lot as a recruitable, although I don't know what he's like as a house member. As a recruitable he suffers from mediocre speed, but tends to have great mixed offenses and decent bulk paired with horse mobility.

Between his Bond Support with Ferdinand and his Personal Lorenz effectively has +4 Str and Mag.

(It's hard to take advantage of a Bond Support unless you're using one of the pair as an Adjunct, but you don't have that many deployment slots, and if one of the pair gets stat screwed it's nice to have the backup plan of being a Adjunct bot.)

Hilda isn't recruitable. (In Crimson Flower.)

Which is a shame, because she has nearly House Leader tier bases. (You'd think Petra is better, but 4 extra hp and being Strength favored is significant.)

Only mentioning her because those base are good enough to make me a little angry.

Ideal Rally Bot and a reasonably good offensive mage to boot. (She doesn't have Physic so her healing leaves something to be desired.)

She doesn't get Rally Speed as fast as Ignatz, so for very early game stuff like trying to fight the Death Knight ASAP Ignatz is more important to bring, but reliably fighting the Death Knight takes a stupid amount of AI manipulation and min-maxing anyway.

If you pick up magic users early (between level 5 and level 10, when they're Monks), then they get both D-rank Faith and D-rank Reason when you recruit them, so it's nice to pick up people like Annette early on.

Basically Petra, except with access to magic weapons and no investment needed.* You can hold off on recruiting Ingrid until you need her, which is great. She'll have E-rank leadership meaning you'll need to tutor her a bit before she can use a flying battalion, but that's a very minor issue.

*Which makes her significantly better than Petra.

Her Paralogue is also one of the easiest ones, meaning it's a great one to do early to get your team high enough level to trivialize the other ones.

He's free to recruit as a female Byleth. Which is quite useful, since Philanderer means that he has nearly House Leader tier bases.

Annoying to recruit in a non New Game+ run early enough to matter, but another unit with House Leader tier offenses, thanks to Lone Wolf.

Didn't take long to talk to everyone, so off to the next week.

(I chose the Black Eagle house, obviously.)

And here's when I realized 4/4 is too early of an birthday to get the +2 Charm ring. Oops.

Oh well, it's not that important.

 

Quests:

Quest to unlock Greenhouse. Mixed Herbs occasionally give the STR herb, so we'll be planting those until we find some Nordsalat Seeds. (Nordsalat gives Speed Carrots.)

Sharing a meal gives 100/150/200 professor points depending whether you invited 0, 1, or 2 people who actually liked the food. Since support rank B is pretty important for recruiting people without having massive piles of skill proficiency, Byleth will be spending something around half her free time eating meals.

Personally I like fishing, but then, I like Runescape Classic, so my grind tolerance is pretty high.

 

Greenhouse:

Doop.

Infuse with magic gives like half an extra drop and 5% higher chance for a stat booster. Pretty marginal, but hey, its free.

 

Dining Hall:

Only enough time to do one thing today, because being bad at Professoring reduces the amount of hours in a day, or something like that.

 

Eating with Bernadetta and Annette. Bernadetta because she needs the most skill ranks to maximize her combat out of the three people in my House---she gets significantly better if you manage to grab her Armor Knight at level 10. Annette because she's a decent mage and a great Rally bot, so I'd like to recruit her early.

Doop.

One quick fishing trip later.

Only showing this to say that I won't be scanning amiibos. Going to be an offline, no DLC run.

Ferdinand's birthday. No flowers since raising support with house members isn't really an issue. (You get support points for tutoring people.)

 

Map:

Suggested Level: 1 

It says, before throwing us against level 7-8 mooks. Basically the game's way of telling you to get used to fighting people who out-level you by around 5 levels.

It's a 'safe' battle, so dead units don't die permanently. You do still lose if either Byleth or Edelgard get forced off the map, though.

10 AS, yeah...

Remember how Caspar only has 6 speed?

Not everyone is that fast, but level 7 stats are pretty hefty to fight through for our team of mostly level 1 mooks.

Ignatz is one of those enemy units who'll lie about who they're going to attack. Ignatz will always pretend that he's not going to shoot anyone if you look at the AI targeting marker thing, but he totally shoots at you. (And not, oddly enough, anyone from the Blue Lions.)

11 AS, 18 Atk, 14 Crit. Byleth is the only unit in our entire lineup that's guaranteed to survive a round from Claude. Everyone else is either straight up ORKOd or seeing positive crit rates.

(One of many reasons I always bring Bernadetta to this map.)

4 AS, thankfully. 18 Atk and 10 Crit with 1-2 range means she's fairly annoying to fight, however. Another reason for Bernadetta.

The other team aggros if you defeat a Professor. (i.e. if you defeat Manuela the Blue Lions will Aggro.)

Which is a really weird trigger, since even if Linhardt didn't exist and you can't just tank 6 casts of 12 Atk magic, you could just... not aggro the Professors before you clean up everyone else.

Do not let this guy use the Wait command. His personal skill is a Rally Defense to himself when he Waits.

He has 12 defense right now. Good idea to bring at least 1 mage other than Linhardt.

21 Atk, 10 AS, 12 Crit. He has positive crit rates on Edelgard, so again, Byleth is more or less the only option for not dying.

11 Atk, 7 AS, nobody should die to her.

Unless, that is, you kill Manuela and aggro'd her whole team at once, rather than picking off the Blue Lions piecemeal.

21 Atk, 13 Crit, but magical, so Byleth and Linhardt can survive him.

It's ideal to lure him with Linhardt holding the heal spell (which has 0 WT), but I'd rather Linhardt hold nothing than hold Nos, because if he holds Nos Hannerman will use Wind instead.

Wind gives him 7 AS rather than 3, letting him double Linhardt holding Nos, which removes any chance of your team doubling him. And note how Wind has 10% crit comapred to Sagittae's 5%. You don't want this guy holding Wind.

 

Our lineup is Byleth and Edelgard, who are forced, followed by Linhardt, since he's our healer, followed by Bernadetta, whose curved shot makes the map a lot easier.

The last spot is a toss up between Hubert and Dorothea for their magical damage (and accuracy---remember, magic ignore terrain evasion). I'm going to test if Dorothea gets Dancer bases if I make her a Dancer at level 1, so that means Hubert.

 

Ferdinand, Caspar, and Petra aren't bad units, they simply don't fill essential roles.

 

Equipment:

Swords for obvious reasons, Iron Lance because she needs lance proficiency for Soldier and Pegasus Knight.

Same reasoning as Byleth.

Axe for Armored Knight.

If we had an extra Axe Lynhardt would've gotten one.

If we had an extra Lance or Axe Bernadetta would've gotten one of each. Axe for Armored Knight, Lance for Soldier & the cavalry classes.

 

Prelude:

The first few turns is a RNG fest. Ashe has 12 Crit (thanks to the Dex +4 the devs gave to everyone on this god damn map), meaning he has 2% crit vs. Bernadetta or thereabouts. If Linhardt landed this hit then Bernadetta would've needed to avoid the crits with nothing except RNG.

Reset Counter: 3

(Linhardt missed.)

I am not doing this map without our healer.

Fight:

Moral Reset Counter: 1

Moral resets is when I do something that deserve a reset. Why did I get one here?

Ashe has positive crit rates on Bernadetta, but there's no easy way to kill the first wave without Bernadetta being damaged. There might be an RNG proof method of doing this map that involves running around in circles, but it's much faster to just reset the map if you get crit to death. (We don't have Divine Pulse yet.)

Having Bernadetta's personal active means we have 3 House Leader tier units rather than 2, which makes the map significantly easier.

End of turn 1.

Note Hubert's oddly aggressive positioning, this is because we need to make a wall to block Ashe from Bernadetta.

Everyone survives a round of Ashe if crits aren't involved, as long as they're full hp. Bernadetta isn't, obviously.

Byleth also moved up---although more to give her Professor exp bonus than to build the wall.

Here's a picture of Smash.

Edelgard rolled the 13% crit, incidentally.

(If she didn't then I would've have Bernadetta curved shot him, and move Linhardt to finish the wall.)

The proper place for Lynhardt is where Bernadetta is currently standing, to make the 'proper' wall, but doing this lets him get a bit of Faith exp.

Note how moving Linhardt one square down would've made the square below Byleth safe to Curved Shot from.

Ashe has something like 2% crit odds vs. Hubert, but 4 shots of 2% chance to die isn't enough to make it two moral resets.

End of turn two.

We're literally only seeing positive crit rates right now because of the Dex +4 on all the enemy mooks.

(This was the enemy phase combat.)

If you surround Ashe you can farm some exp, since he has 3 Vulnerary uses, but I'm not going to do that in a LP. (I totally do that when I'm playing normally.)

Doop.

There's a way to position your units with AI manipulation so you separate Hilda and Claude after aggroing them with a Curved Shot. (Claude would try to snipe one of your units while standing inside the bushes, and Hilda would rush forward.)

Trying to figure out AI manipulation without combat saves is total ass, so I haven't bothered figuring out exactly how to manage it. If I do it, great, if not, eh.

Doop.

Curved Shot is lowkey amazing. (It missed, but being able to aggro without getting hit on Enemy Phase makes the next bit a lot easier.)

Marching on forward. In retrospect things would've been easier if I healed Hubert to full hp here, but eh.

Doop.

Hilda has positive crit rates vs. Edelgard if she's holding a Bow rather than an Axe (Luck is a pretty good stat in Three Houses), so I play it safe and don't go for enemy phase counter-attacks.

Doop.

I failed a true separation, which would've let me kill Hilda without Claude getting a poke in afterwards, but eh, at least they're not right next to each other.

(Pictured, Curved Shot being amazing.)

This drops Hilda low enough that Hubert can kill her, but with low enough accuracy that I'd rather risk Claude's crit chance. (86%, I haven't done the math on how often you'd miss at 86% for a 2-roll system, but I guessed that it would've been higher than the 2% * 2 or whatever crit rates Claude would have vs. Edelgard.)

Smash is great, pity it's so expensive.

Great level. Some early Def would be nice to make the next maps easier, but we're mostly just waiting for Edelgard to hit level 10 to grab her 12 Def.

Ah healing spells, the light of civilization.

(We're still mostly savages, however, since Nobles only get half the spell-slots of Monks and such.)

Edelgard is about to get shot, with crit-kills being possible, but, again, still not high fail chance enough to increment the Moral Reset Counter.

For the record, 4% crit means Claude would've had positive crit even without the Dex +4 skill he got.

Pretty much only Byleth holding a sword is safe from crits on this map.

Curved Shot. Amazing. Etc. Etc.

I moved Hubert for the +3% extra accuracy.

Byleth + Linhardt KOs Claude, I believe, but I'm not 100% sure. This move might've been stupid.

Anyway, the lance hit landed, so I walk Byleth in to pick up some exp.

Eh, it has strength. Luck is good, don't get me wrong, but it's not as valuable as Speed or Def right now.

Byleth can hold 3 weight worth of equipment without penalty now, however, so it's a little like getting a point of Speed as well. (Every 5 strength lets you carry 1 more weight of equipment without penalty.)

Not going to kill Manuela, so the bulk of the team will be moving towards the Blue Lions now.

Linhardt will be left behind to soak up Manuela's tome uses.

Breaking things grants exp, oddly enough, so here's Hubert farming some Axe proficiency.

Lance Exp.

Doop.

Linhardt goes into threat range, holding heal. (Which I regret, since it meant Manuela no longer doubles him.)

It's actually pretty awful to farm exp like this, since he's only getting 1 exp per hit. (Weakness in Axes.)

Then again, it's not like 2 Lance exp per combat is a lot either.

Slowly marching towards the Blue Lions.

Note how accurate Manuela's counter is, thanks to magic ignoring bushes. (Also note how Linhardt is being doubled, meaning Manuela's running out of tome uses twice as fast.)

Slow and steady wins the race.

This uses up Manuela's last tome use, so I start moving Linhardt towards the team.

-100g.

Still kind of miss the DS sized screenshots.

Dedue can't get into the thicket above Edelgard, so it moves him to the open plains to her right.

(Him attacking means he doesn't get to Wait, making him a lot easier to chip down.)

The fact that Linhardt is separated is annoying, but not too much of a problem.

This is why you bring mages to this map, of course. (Especially if Dedue somehow gets into bushes.)

Just farming some exp.

Lance Exp.

(Note how Byleth is Lucky enough that she's seeing 0% crit rates without Prowess active, Dedue doesn't crit much though.)

The map is a lot more hectic if you kill Manuela, but doing it like this means that everyone heads into the meat grinder one at a time.

Giving Byleth a Bow so she can counter attack Mercedes.

Linhardt's last heal. In retrospect I should've saved it so he can mage-bait better, but honestly by that time it would've been fine if he got crit to death anyway.

4 move is so annoying.

 

Not too useful to give Byleth Bow exp, but I'm not going to have Bernadetta chug two Vulneraries just for 3 Bow exp.

Doop.

Note the 2% crit chance, fortunately Mercedes hits like a wet noodle. (This was the enemy phase combat.)

Doop.

And doop.

Really want some speed now. It's trivial to get Byleth thief for 11 Speed, but 11 Speed at level 10 isn't exactly great.

 

Here's me contemplating having Edelgard tank Dimitri, by grabbing a Training Sword.

Problem? 5 Luck means she's seeing positive crit rates, and it's a game over if Edelgard dies.

Goes to 7 speed, which is enough to avoid Dimitri's double.

But the guy has 12% crit.

Still, that's for next turn.

I look at this, and then I realize I don't actually want to replay the map if Edelgard gets crit to death.

So...

Playing with enemies that crit you to death is pretty annoying, especially so early that you haven't had a chance to min-max your team yet. It gets way better once we have Divine Pulse, but that's not till next map.

Slow and Steady.

Enemy Phase combat.

Hubert hits like a very accurate truck, but only for 5 times a map right now.

Poke.

And, slice.

I don't want Hanneman to swap to Wind, hence why I'm unequipping Nos.

Pretty much only cleanup left.

I think that 6% crit goes to 0% if Linhardt is holding heal, but I'm not 100% sure on the numbers on the various Prowess levels. (Linhardt has level 2 Faith right now.)

Byleth has a ORKO with her training sword, but this way she gets sword exp and Edelgard gets regular exp.

Smash because no sense in taking risks.

Pretty much just 1k gold.

Manuela in a forest is also a pretty good chance to farm weapon exp, but it wasn't intentional.

4 move is so slow.

Note the 84% hit chance. You don't get easy repairs on magic weapons until part 2 or New Game+, so mages are pretty important right now.

I'm honestly not sure if it's worth trying to grind Hubert Axe exp like this, but it's not like he has anything better to do.

This is only for the 3% extra hit from support bonuses.

A miss, incidentally.

Likewise.

For some reason the enemies on this map don't heal until they're below 10 hp, IRRC, which is kind of weird when people like Byleth are walking around with 15 Strength.

This lands.

Miss.

Hits.

MVP tends to refill motivation entirely or, in the case of Byleth, give 25 to everyone. Since everyone starts with 50 motivation this is pretty good.

I'm not 100% sure, but I think the MVP refill only applies to story maps.

[Shadow Mir]

5 hours ago, DehNutCase said:

I'm going to test if Dorothea gets Dancer bases if I make her a Dancer at level 1

Spoiler alert: Dancer has 0s across the board for base stats.

[DehNutCase]

4 hours ago, Shadow Mir said:

Spoiler alert: Dancer has 0s across the board for base stats.

Huh... Guess I mixed up Dancer bases with Enlightened One bases.

 

Oh well, saves me having to rush to recruit an extra mage, I guess.

[Shadow Mir]

14 hours ago, DehNutCase said:

she picks up the Rescue + Pass combo if you go Faith.

That would be worth noting if not for Rescue getting nerfed (its range is now Mag/4).

14 hours ago, DehNutCase said:

I like Lorenz a lot as a recruitable, although I don't know what he's like as a house member. As a recruitable he suffers from mediocre speed, but tends to have great mixed offenses and decent bulk paired with horse mobility.

I dunno - personally, I'd consider Leonie better to recruit if you wanted a Cavalier, considering that Lorenz is... not exactly good, even as a recruitable. Also, his coming as a Cavalier hurts him because said class has -10 to speed growth, and Lorenz's speed is pretty iffy as is.

[DehNutCase]

31 minutes ago, Shadow Mir said:

I dunno - personally, I'd consider Leonie better to recruit if you wanted a Cavalier, considering that Lorenz is... not exactly good, even as a recruitable. Also, his coming as a Cavalier hurts him because said class has -10 to speed growth, and Lorenz's speed is pretty iffy as is.

On my other playthrough Lorenz consistently had enough physical damage to 2HKO people with a brave lance, so the speed thing didn't really matter. He couldn't do that to armors, but his Mag was high enough to 2RKO them with Frozen Lance. Defensively speaking he had enough raw bulk to survive being doubled most of the time. That's more or less all I ask for out of a second stringer.

Mind that I got both Leonie and Lorenz near level 20 in that run, so I wasn't looking for units to heavily invest in, just some random 2nd stringers to fill the lineup, and Lorenz was really good at that.

[DehNutCase]

Ch. 2:

Splitting this chapter into two halves since there's two maps in it.

 

Part 1:

Spoiler

 

Academy:

This was Annette's birthday, I believe. I buy flowers for non-House members since getting them to Support B lets you recruit them really easily.

Yes, I'd like to do the only option available to me.

 

Not Quests:

Leading with Not Quests rather than Quests this time since there's some important stuff.

This, is a book.

A Professor Book. (+100 Points)

So's this.

I won't show everything I pick up, but I'll screenshot the important stuff. (+100 points)

You get Professor points for gardening, and I think how much points you get is based on the quality & quantity of the yield? (Not that I care, since I'll be planting Nordsalat forever soon.)

For pure Professor Point min-maxing you should plant the Boa-Fruit this week (I found it on the ground during the last exploration session, IRRC, it's a 5 star seed), but I'd much rather try for the +1 Str item.

It's about 5% extra chance for a stat booster every time you go up a tier in your Cultivation Method, so unless I have major cash issues I use the most expensive available.

Like I said, Sylvain's a free recruit, and his stats are pretty good.

He has D+ Lances and Axes, and D Riding, so he'll get Armor Knight and Cavalier without any more skill exp investment, which is nice. Picking up D+ swords might be nice to fix his Dex, but not really mandatory. Recruits tend to come with an Iron weapon, a Vulnerary, and an item worth roughly 1k gold. Some of them come with a +1 stat herb instead, though.

Compared to his level 1 bases Sylvain got +1 Hp, +1 Str, +1 Mag, +1 Dex, +1 Speed, +1 Luck, +1 Def, +1 Res, +1 Cha, meaning he effectively had 50% growths in everything these last 2 levels. Boring, but quite acceptable.

Quests:

The battalion quest, pity it doesn't unlock the guild. Jeralt's Mercenaries aren't exactly bad, but the stats they give aren't valuable yet this early in the game. (It gives 3 MT at level 5, which is nice, but the real draw is the 10% Crit and 15% Avoid.) The other two are 'better than nothing' tier.

Cooking quest. You can cook once every time you explore, and cooking sessions in the same month stack, so early game it's worth paying the Professor Game penalty to stack food buffs if you're worried about some up coming map. Cooking gives 100/150 Professor Points depending on whether you cooked with someone who didn't like cooking or someone who did.

So you'd lose 50 Points compared to eating.

Time limited quests are... interesting, I guess? Aside from the quests that require you to do combat maps, I'm not sure why you'd wait to do quests anyway. *Shrug*

Choir quest. I'm don't know how much support points the Choir gives compared to eating, but it gives some minor faith exp for everyone involved and leadership exp for Byleth, so I tend to prioritize Choir over sharing meals.

Take a look, it's in a book.

It's in 3 or 4 books for this one.

Not really quest related, but this is the cooking quest, so eh. Dedue isn't recruitable, Manuela is level based to recruit (so you don't really need to grind support ranks for her), so I'll be cooking with Ashe and Mercedes until I get both of them into my House.

+150 Professor points. (or -50, depending on your point of view.) Cooking up Defense food because the next map has people with 14 AS.

Number of units on my team with 11 AS? Zero.

Musical Fetch Quest complete.

The Dining Hall has a bonus today, but it's only for people already in your house, and I don't need to recharge motivation yet. So I'm singing with Annette and Lorenz for recruitment purposes.

Choir is 100/150/200 Professor Points just like the Dining Hall, depending on whether 0/1/2 people like to sing. But it's only once a day.

An Iron Shield is well worth the 1k cost it'd take to buy at the moment, but I'm a giant cheapskate so I'll just swap the single Leather Shield between my units.

The Steel Sword is cool, though.

 

Lectures:

The nice thing about Edelgard is that she doesn't really need skill exp for anything. Armor Knight is free for her, Thief easy to pick up if she gets Speed screwed, and she starts with better bases than Monk.

So I just have her start working on Pegasus Knight.

Getting D+ Axes will make Hubert's physical bulk a lot better once he hits level 10, and tutoring for it this early is inefficient, so it's better to have him self-study for it. Focusing Reason in addition to that because getting more spell-slots is important.

Faith to pick up Monk bases, Axes for Armor Knight later. (D Lances & D Riding means getting into Soldier and Cavalier won't be an issue.)

Similar reasoning as Hubert, except in Linhardt's case he gets Physic rather than Mire for his next spell.

I'll probably switch Faith into Sword once he picks up Physic, to fix his speed a little.

I have no idea what to do with Caspar so he gets Lances for Cavalier (he already has D in axes, so Armor Knight will be trivial) and Faith for Monk's bases.

I prefer faith over reason because you can heal spam for exp on units you're slow rolling.

Faith for Monk Bases, Axe for Armor Knight. I'll swap Faith into Heavy Armor once she picks up Monk.

Same as Hubert, pretty much. Odd that she doesn't have an Axe Weakness.

Picking up lances for Pegasus Knight later, and Bows to get Curved Shot ASAP so she can at least contribute a bit in combat.

Sylvain's base skill ranks are so good that he can do whatever he wants, so I have him working on Heavy Armor to make Armor Knight easier to get, and Faith for Monk bases.

Using the group tasks for armor exp isn't very efficient for Bernadetta, but she's the one who cares about Armor Knight the most out of my House. Hubert's tagging along since Linhardt doesn't need it as much and Dorothea has an easier time getting into Armor Knight anyway, since she doesn't have an Axe weakness.

Tutoring Lances is significantly more efficient than anything else right now, and it'll be useful later.

Heavy Armor to pick up Seal Speed eventually.

(One of the sessions was perfect, so we got a star.)

Hubert picks up Mire at D+, so it's nice to tutor for it.

You get some extra Professor Points if you pick the best answer, so it's probably a good idea to look it up for non New Game+. You restore 50 Motivation for giving the best answer and 25 for the okay answer. (0 for the worst.)

Note that the person standing behind the questioner, in this case Dorothea, although you can't quite see her, will also regain some motivation depending on your answer and whether they agree with it. Dorothea doesn't agree with the best answer for Bernadetta, but eh.

Cheers.

You do get penalized for self-studying one of your weaknesses, but it's a 20% penalty rather than the gigantic 50% penalty of tutoring without statues or group tasks.

Doop.

Raphael's birthday. Not in my house, so yes on the flowers.

Group Duty got Bernadetta and Hubert a C support, which is nice.

 

Battle:

Not the 'real' fight, unfortunately. This map is a complete joke on Maddening, since everyone gets 1 exp per combat (although it's great for weapon and class exp). Kills give a bit more, of course.

They barely even outnumber us.

Level 3 stats...

Better, but still a complete pushover.

 

Not much to say about the map, it's pretty much just so you have the class exp to get Hp +5 on your core unit(s).

I deploy everyone since I have the slots for it.

Training weapons are honestly pretty great even for doing damage, since this early people will be having accuracy issues.

Interesting that Training Lances are cheaper than Training Axes.

A pair of bows for Petra & Bernadetta.

There are exactly two people with Brawling Prowess in my team, so I'll you one guess who I give these to.

(It's Caspar this map, Byleth next map.)

Classic exp grinding loadout.

Same for Edelgard.

Our mages are getting training Axes now that we actually have axes to pass around.

Linhardt gets a Sword rather than an Axe because I'm more worried about his Speed than his Def.

A pair of bows.

Pair of Lances.

I gave Caspar the Leather Shield because I thought Training Gauntlets weighed 0. They weigh 1.

I should probably work on feeding Dorothea some kills, since trying to get to level 5 with only 4 spells per map is pretty annoying.

Petra gets some of everything, but she'll mostly be plinking with her bow.

Lances for the good weapon exp, Iron Axe for damage. (Not really, since Tempest Lance does 5 more damage than Smash, but eh.)

 

I didn't move the battalions from their default users since I forgot about them. But they don't really matter anyway.

Map Start:

It's probably a pretty bad feeling when you're getting doubled by Caspar. If Caspar had just one more base Str or Speed he'd be able to double these guys with the Leather Shield equipped.

Sylvain basically takes 0 damage, so I send him into the woods to start farming some class exp. (He doesn't need regular exp since he's level 3.)

Doop.

Enemy Phase combat.

Also enemy phase.

Fighting in bushes is pretty annoying when you aren't magic.

Our hits go through, though.

In retrospect I probably should have given Bernadetta a Training Lance so she farms class exp faster.

Healer doing healer things.

Byleth walking up to soak some damage.

Doop.

Honestly it's pretty much impossible to lose on this map.

And here's Hubert farming some Reason exp.

End of Turn 2.

Enemy Phase combat.

Ditto.

(Not shown, me moving Edelgard back into our lineup.)

I'll be honest, I have no idea why the left the enemy levels so low on this map, it's basically just busy work.

Poke.

Smack.

More Linhardt.

Most of my unit-turns on this map is spent doing nothing. (Bringing 10 people against 15 is kind of hilarious overkill.)

Well, 11, now.

Enemy phase combat.

Poke.

Lance Exp.

Fist exp.

Linhardt exp.

It has Mag, it's a good level. Linhardt doesn't really need any stat except Magic (and maybe Resistance) until he's level 10, everything else will be fixed by promotion bases.

In retrospect, I should've used some gambits on this map, to farm battalion exp.

Poke.

And arrowed.

Left side is clear.

This map is a lot more interesting if you're online, since there's items to grab off the ground.

Enemy Phase combat. Ferdinand also took one, but I missed the screenshot timing.

I like how this map doesn't at all prepare Byleth's students for fighting bandits, considering the huge level jump.

Poke.

Heal.

Thrust.

Doop.

If this was a level 9 Mook Petra would hit once, for something like 1 or 2 damage.

It's a good thing Three Houses uses a two roll system, otherwise seeing 80% hit rates all the time would be pretty unbearable.

Combat got Hubert D+ Reason, giving us Mire.

Doop.

Handed Bernadetta the Training Lance so that the AI doesn't try to hit her.

If Bernadetta had been holding her bow this guy would've went for her instead of Caspar. (Honestly not sure why I'm bothering to get him exp right now, it'd be a lot quicker just to adjunct him up to par later.)

Almost done.

2 x 2 damage... (Enemy Phase combat)

I mean, this is Edelgard, you're not really supposed to compare her damage to other people. (Enemy Phase still.)

The combat got her Hp +5, meaning she can run back inside the formation now.

But only after another enemy phase combat.

Moved her back first thing, since she didn't need anymore combats.

Doop.

Doop.

Poke. (It's pretty easy to farm exp with Bernadetta, since you just keep her full hp and her damage output is halved.)

8 damage...

More heal exp for Linhardt.

Almost done.

Doop.

Poke.

4 damage...

Not like Petra's much better.

Poke.

I was too lazy to move people, so I just ended the turn here.

Doop.

Enemy Phase combat.

Ditto.

Poke.

And Hubert walks in for some 'boss' exp. (Pretty sure this guy gives less exp than the mooks on the next map, thanks to the level difference.)

Still gave him enough exp for a pretty great level, though.

And loot.

I don't know why I insisted on giving Caspar so many combats, but I did.

I even ended the turn to give him an enemy phase combat.

And then I went, 'hey, Bernadetta's almost level 2,' and fed her the kill anyway.

It's a hell of a level, though.

I'm not sure why they're paying us to beat up knights, but hey, money.

Don't know why Petra's the MVP, either. (No motivation gain.)

 

 

[Shadow Mir]

On 12/10/2019 at 5:50 PM, DehNutCase said:

Jeralt is going to steal one of my kills on his phase, but as far as I know he never kills bosses, which is very polite of him.

That's a new feature in this game - if a boss would have been defeated by an NPC, they're instead reduced to 1 HP.

[Zapp Branniglenn]

Going for armor knight bases on mages is an interesting strat. I hope it pays off. Having 12 Def around level 10 does sound enticing, but remember that level 20 magic classes also provide that base to work with. In the long term, all you gain is whichever points of Def they can pick up during those ten levels. In the short term though, it's hard to say how much that extra defense will keep them alive.

For Hubert, I like to grab archer and Hit +20 to help salvage his low accuracy spells. It also boosts his hit rate on gambits which mitigates the penalty of having lower charm than your target quite a bit. His native E+ and strength in bows makes it quick to pick up. 

Edited December 12, 2019 by Glennstavos

[DehNutCase]

Ch 2:

Part 2:

Spoiler

Academy:

(Well, not really the Academy, no more exploration this month.)

Lectures:

We didn't have a chance to refresh motivation on account of being forced to spend our free time 'fighting' knights, so I'm tutoring whoever still has Motivation.

Here we have Linhardt getting tutored to try and grab Physic.

Bernadetta got 50 Motivation back from me answering her question last week, so here's more Lance exp for her.

This makes Soldier guaranteed, which is nice if you're trying to stuff multiple classes into her before a certain map. (The rolls for class promotion are set at the start of a month, so you can manipulate it by changing the order you do promotions in. If I would fail a 70% promotion the first week but succeed the second I can do Soldier first then Monk, for example.)

Tempest Lance is pretty great, but getting into melee range with someone I like to keep at half hp isn't necessarily the best idea.

Trying to grab Thoron. Since Dancer apparently has 0 base stats across the board there's no reason to play the game while down a mage.

I'm not sure why they bother giving you a choice for this? 'No, sir, I don't want 100-200 Professor points and a bunch of skill exp.'

Petra and Sylvain. (Which probably meant I only got 100 Professor Points for this, but I wasn't paying attention.)

Another Perfect. And we can really see the way having a weakness in Heavy Armor dumpsters your skill exp growth from Group Task.

This is pretty important, since Edelgard can hold Lances without seeing positive crit from enemies now, most of the time.

*Shrug*

If you're willing to reroll to pass Monk E+ is more or less good enough to get into the class, so I'll probably be redoing some goals next month.

This means Linhardt can move off studying Faith for the time being. (Will probably be trying for Swords.)

Caspar... isn't really relevant. Even if I do decide to use him for serious maps (i.e. not fighting level 2 mooks) it'll be after getting him a bunch of Adjunct exp.

Fine to swap out of Faith here, too.

Fighter has the highest base Str of the level 5 classes (tied with Soldier, at 8), but it's also completely unnecessary for a mage to ever hit people with a physical attack, so I'm not sure if I'll use 500g to grab Dorothea some Str.

I probably will, since it's kind of like having a fraction of a speed, due to weight.

She'll hit for like 4 damage, because she isn't Bernadetta, but 3 ranged attacks are still great. (Especially if you're stupid, like me, and try to fight people on a bridge---the next map is a lot easier if you don't do that.)

Can swap to something else, although Sylvain doesn't really need anything. Maybe I'll pick up Swords as a just-in-case for if he gets amazingly Speed Screwed. (He already has 9 Speed so it'd be pretty hard to get screwed enough for Thief to matter.)

Overview of our current skill exp. Notably, Linhardt already has a 100% chance to go Priest.

It's actually a close fight between resting and seminars, they're both so useless.

You can manually set goals to determine who attends seminars, but I'm too lazy for that fiddly micromanagement when it doesn't involve my mooks dying, so I just picked Manuela's Seminar, seeing how she already has a packed class.

(The optimal thing to do here is to get a full class into Seteth's Seminar, he has C in Lance and Leadership so you get the most exp, and Lance is useful for everyone trying to get a Mount---for me, that means everyone except Mages---and Leadership is always useful.)

Monotone 'yay.' (Byleth doesn't need Monk bases and she'll only be in a class that can use Magic for something like half a map after she hits level 5.)

50 Motivation isn't bad, but I'd rather have some Professor Points.

Taking a Seminar or Resting is something like -400 Professor Points right now, and it'll be -600 or even -900 pretty soon.

Mercedes' Birthday. Not in my House, so flowers.

Suggest Level: 3. (It says, when 95% of Level 3 units are guaranteed to get doubled on this map.)

This is Maddening, so enemy units take 3 unit-turns to kill if you're lucky. (2 if the units involved are House Leader tier.) It's hard to focus fire a unit three times on the bridge, so the map is a lot easier if you just wait for the enemies to cross before exploding them.

I'm a dumbass, so I only know how to rush forward.

19 Atk, 9 AS. Pretty scary, but they only have 16 Avo so you'll rarely miss against them. And, as long as you aren't Caspar, they probably won't double you.

17 Atk, 10 AS. Scarier, since if you're weighed down even a little they'll probably double you.

Cheating bastards somehow managed to get into Archer at level 9, so they have Bowrange +1.

(And Poison Strike, but for some reason these guys tend to attack last, so Poison Strike doesn't really matter.)

16 Atk, which is the lowest of the Physical units. 14 Attack Speed, which is enough to double everyone. Maddening has some stupid high Speed on units in 'fast' classes.

Also has 30 Avo, so they'll be dodging quite a few attacks.

They have Pass in case you think fighting on the bridge to make choke points is a good idea.

(I don't know why, but I always insist on fighting on the bridge on this map, even though I know it's way easier to just camp out in the starting location.)

10 Atk, 7 AS.

No idea why, but enemy casters tend to be complete jokes until they get into level 20 classes.

This guy has a Chest key, and, for some reason, 1 less Str and Speed compared to the other Axe Mooks on this map.

They also have this awful Battalion.

Note the 13 Prt (he gets +1 more on top of his 12 Def thanks to his Battalion, it's the same as the other Axe Mook's), non House Leaders will be hitting for 1s and 0s, unless you remembered to save some spell uses for him.

 

Not much to say, just don't be stupid, camp the starting area (enemies will aggro one by one for the first few turns), and the map is pretty trivial. i.e. don't play this map like I do.

Caspar is benched because he's doubled if he isn't holding a fist weapon, and if he is holding a fist weapon he does 0 damage. The early game really isn't kind to his bases, even if Born Fighter is amazing.

 

Equipment:

Byleth will be taking most of the combats this map, so I give her the +1 Prt Battalion.

Edelgard gets Jeralt's since it has the highest Endurance. (Since she'll be seeing the 2nd highest amount of combats.)

Bernadetta gets Seiros Mercs for the extra Physical Atk.

The biggest problem with Training Gauntlets is that anyone strong enough to punch people without healing them is also strong enough to hold Training Weapons without a Speed penalty, so this is pretty much the only map they'll be useful. (Since it's just barely early enough that Training Sword + Leather Shield weighs too much for Byleth, on account of us not being able to forge Training weapons to be lighter right now.)

Anyone strong enough to do serious damage on player phase with Gauntlets would also do just about the same damage by swapping to Steel/Silver and using a combat Art, so yeah.

I get that they gimped fists since they didn't want them to be overpowered, but the numbers are way too under-tuned, especially when you consider that combat arts are pretty useless for fist weapons.

Edelgard picks up Caspar's Iron Axe, since he's benched this map.

Not much to say, note Bernadetta in threat range since I'm trying to get her personal active. (It didn't work because, contrary to what I expected, the melee mooks moved first even though the archer would've done more damage, on account of being fast enough to double Bernadetta---this meant they blocked the archer from being able to hit Bernadetta.)

This is pretty much how you're supposed to fight the enemy waves, just lure them into the right spots via positioning and then destroy them next turn.

(I only do this once, because I'm stupid.)

8 damage with a 0MT weapon, Byleth.jpg

Ditto. (Both of these were enemy phase combats.)

The 2nd Axe mook blocked the archer from Bernadetta, so he pokes Sylvain twice.

So I'm forced to make Bernadetta lose hp the normal way.

I like Mire a lot, Support bonuses are based on who's in attack range, so long range weapons means the holder provides a ton of support.

(The Defense debuff is also great, especially considering we have someone with a 0 MT brave weapon.)

Double roll system means that this is pretty likely to land, but it's still a bit risky. Doing 70%s that need to land would cause a lot of resets if it wasn't for Divine Pulse.

Def isn't too important, but the Speed is great.

Tempest Lance is a hell of a drug. (Although Slvain would've done 9 damage without it, thanks to his House Leader tier bases.)

Linhardt doing Linhardt things.

Just nabbing some extra weapon exp.

I only use fists if I have a really good reason to, since Lance exp is significantly more important. (Unfortunately, lances weigh even more than swords, so using them for enemy phase combats would involve Byleth getting doubled.)

Great level. Unlike Edelgard, who gets Armor Knight for free, Axe and Heavy Armor is a lot more annoying for Byleth, so I like it a lot when I don't have to go for it. Speed is a little worrying, though.

Note how I'm steadily moving my team forward, because I'm stupid.

(Just camp your end of the bridge like a smart person.)

The waves seem to aggro automatically, so you don't really need to do anything other than sit on your end of the bridge.

The sword mooks on this map double literally everyone, so I make Byleth hold the Steel Sword for maximum damage output. (The hit rate is a bit iffy with Steel, though, so I end up using Training Sword for later sword on sword combats.)

Pictured, a horrible place to fight.

If I just waited 1 more turn this'll be identical to the first wave in terms of how easy it is to clean up, but I never remember to.

Doop.

At least they're polite enough to only do 4 damage when they're guaranteed to double your ass.

(Enemy Phase combat)

Chip damage + setting up a support for a gambit.

This... Misses. (The +2 Charm ring would've been real handy right now---I messed up the birthday, you needed to have Byleth's birthday in late April if you wanted the ring ASAP.)

tl;dr is that after a few more moves I realized this had to hit, so I use a Divine Pulse. (It wouldn't have had to hit if I fought in the normal location, since I'd be able to get more combats in, but this bridge is an awful place to fight.)

Divine Pulse: 1

On any other game this would've been a reset, but this is Three Houses so I get to play major sloppy. : )

Opening with this instead this time. Note that the accuracy rolls are pre-determined, so attacks with the same accuracy or better are guaranteed to hit until you do something to use up more or less of the already determined RNG numbers. We knew this attack hit before the Divine Pulse, so we know anything with more than 68 Accuracy is guaranteed to hit right now. (We also know anything less than 70 accuracy will miss for the attack after this one.)

i.e. if I was thinking properly, I would've moved someone to provide support for the gambit without attacking (which would've used up this combat's accuracy roll), and then landed the 70% Gambit guaranteed.

(If you're completely insane you can probably memorize\write down an entire map's worth of numbers, use a Divine Pulse exactly once, and never miss a single attack that matters.)

Curved Shot, amazing, etc. etc.

Enemies tend to have toilet paper Res, so even low MT magic tend to hit for a significant amount.

Curved Shot, amazing, etc. etc. (100% Accuracy)

This lands.

I like Steel Weapons a lot, their accuracy is a bit meh, but you're almost guaranteed to get your ass doubled on Maddening anyway, so the weight barely matters. They even have high durability to make inventory management less of a hassle.

Tempest Lance, still a hell of a drug.

(Yes, the guy's 2 hp, I'm using it for accuracy, not the 8 MT.)

No breaks on this chu chu train, everyone forward.

(I am totally a master tactician, I swear.)

Definitely don't have a pocket goddess I keep around to Bite the Dust my mistakes.

Linhardt doing Linhardt things.

Hp +5 usually turn people from barely getting ORKOd to barely avoiding the ORKO, so it's amazing this early.

The enemies are in level 10 classes, so 5 move, hence why everyone is standing a bit behind Byleth, so they have room to retreat. (Fighting at an mobility disadvantage is pretty awful.)

Byleth is holding gauntlets because I didn't check the next wave's enemy composition yet. (0 WT doesn't save you from fourteen attack speed.)

Training Sword for accuracy.

Vulnerary because I want to conserve Physic uses. -100g

This is basically the entire game for me. Everyone just watches while Byleth carries them.

This wave is basically trivial, since the mage is a complete non-factor, but no sense getting careless.

Enemy phase combat.

Ditto.

I... think this combat gets Dorothea D+ reason? (She gets Thoron at C, so no 3 range spell yet. The map after this is a complete nightmare without good mages*---assuming you're going for the stat boosters---so I'll probably try to tutor her for Thoron.)

*I personally consider it the hardest map in the entire Crimson Flower route, at least if you're trying to grab the stat boosters. (It'd be way easier on New Game+, though, since you can just pick up a bunch of mages from recruitment + Byleth would be even more overpowered.)

Nothing wrong with archers that aren't Bernadetta, but they do tend to do about half her damage.

The priest hits for like 4 damage, so it's fine to stand in his attack range.

I do trade swap to maximize her Attack Speed, though, just in case.

Curved Shot, etc. etc.

Very useful, since this'll mean Bernadetta can probably survive 1 combat from everyone for the near future, making her personal trivial to trigger.

Poke.

Here's a Physic use, not that Byleth really needs it.

Like I said, this guy's a complete joke.

Pretty much just mop up at this point. The next wave is coming, but 2 Axes and 1 Archer isn't that hard to deal with when you have room to maneuver.

Hubert's 22 base hp means that he's exactly ORKOd despite the our +1 Def food bonus, but I'm leaving him out there to bait the archer anyway.

It says something about how miserly I am when my team's sharing a single Leather Shield.

Edelgard is also in the thief's range, but he goes for the highest damage combat since the counter doesn't kill him.

The axe mooks don't have pass, so it's trivial to keep your back liners safe, hence why I'm comfortable taking a fight right next to the wave of 3 axe mooks.

Hubert... misses.

Oh well, at least he's providing +3 hit for our player phase combats, standing where he is.

It's kind of annoying that if you go straight to attacking your character doesn't move to the square they're attacking from.

Great level, but it's starting to look like I'll need to pick up thief of Byleth.

Like Hubert, Dorothea is ORKOd despite the food +Def buff.

Doop.

(She lands her spell.)

I trade swap Byleth out of Steel Sword so she's not being doubled, in retrospect I should've swapped to Training Sword, but eh.

Doop.

Doop.

And dead.

More Linhardt things.

The thief opts for hitting Byleth, which is convenient, since it means he's further from the other axe mooks to our left.

Just mop up left now.

Enemy Phase combat.

Doop.

Turns out this wasn't where I wanted to stand---I'm trying to fight both of the axe mooks on enemy phase, but the way they decided to move meant that one of them was blocking the other one. -100g

Farming exp.

And dead.

A little bit of shuffling later.

'

Everything left will only aggro when you trigger them, so the map is more or less solved already.

This was the wrong place to stand, sir, you needed to be above Byleth, not to her left.

(Enemy Phase combat)

Losing out on 9 damage isn't really a big deal, though, since we have more than enough unit-turns for this wave.

Hp +5, still a great skill.

The 12 damage is because of Mire, mind, not because Gauntlets suddenly became good. (Pretty sure a Wrath Strike from a Steel Sword kills this guy anyway.)

The guy dropped a Chest Key, but I missed that screenshot, so here's one of Byleth holding it in her inventory.

Nosferatu is pretty good as long as you're fine with being 0 Speed forever.

(It has an weight of 8.)

Tempest Lance doing Tempest Lance things. (In the Prologue map, Dimitri OHKOs people from full hp with it.)

Eh, it has strength, I'll take it.

Curved Shot mostly for accuracy.

Ditto.

Great levels from Bernadetta, since her offenses are pretty much all I care about. (The Mag is wasted, though, since Monk gives her 8 Mag regardless.)

And Dorothea is now just a walking healing tile.

(Having only one spell as a magic user is pretty horrible.)

She gets a great level out of the combat, though.

If you go down the stairs to the left the last wave of mooks will aggro, so that's where I go next.

Byleth has more important things to do than opening chests, so she delegates. (She also gets the Leather Shield back.)

Everyone just standing around while Byleth does things, as per usual.

Doop.

Enemy Phase combat.

Don't really care about some minor stats at this point, anyway, since the hard part of the map is already over. (I won't bother showing Battalions getting level ups, but I'll mention their max stats if they're interesting.)

Doop.

Smack.

(Interestingly, this guy is our first experience with Breaker skills, he also has 4 in Axe Prowess, which I didn't notice during the pre-map look through.)

And all you need to know about breaker skills is that they're a complete joke. 20 hit/avoid, seriously? And you need to be holding an advantaged weapon to boot. Axe v. Lances, Sword v. Axes, etc. Maybe if you tacked 20% crit as well they'd be dangerous/useful, but they're pretty useless as is.

I decided that a walking heal tile is more important than whatever Petra brings to the team, so Dorothea sub-contracts the box opening duties.

Note Edelgard walking towards the archer in the top right. No reason not to pick up free exp.

She's even fast enough to avoid the double while holding her lance. (Lance Prowess means she won't be seeing crit odds, which is great.)

This is 10k gold, I believe, I tend to forget about Bullions in my inventory and always think I'm cash starved. And then I go sell thing and I suddenly find like 30k in vendor trash.

The next wave aggros if you walk down the stairs, but for some reason a lone enemy is already walking towards us, so I don't walk down yet.

Note the archer slowly moving towards us from the top left.

Bows have 20% less accuracy per square above 2, so enemy bow knights tend to end up complete jokes.

18 damage looks nice, but do remember Byleth can pull that off with a Combat Art easily, without gimping her enemy phase damage.

(And it's a long road yet before she gets to double people.)

Curved Shot, etc. etc.

Edelgard is walking towards us for healing, and the bow mook she lured is dutifully making their way towards us as well.

This is after I sent Petra down the stairs.

A lot of waiting for enemies to show up on this map.

Out of Heal uses, but I still have 1 or 2 Physics left.

This would be a good level if it wasn't for the fact that I'm planning to fix his stats via class bases anyway.

Archer almost made it to us on the right side, but the wave of mooks on the left is still a few turns off.

Byleth misses a hit, which is actually pretty rare for an 85% attack.

So I have Petra tank a pair of counters to make up for the damage difference.

Curved Shot, etc. etc.

Lots of waiting still.

This picture makes it look like Edelgad can just slice people in half with wind pressure or something, but no she just walk up and hits the guy.

Training Lance to avoid doubles & pick up the weapon exp I actually care about.

Hp +5 meant I didn't need to worry about shuffling our Leather Shield around, Hubert comfortably survives.

Speed is nice, especially if he manages to get 11 before level 10.

(Could use some Dex & Luck, but accuracy issues will become less and less of a problem as we get support ranks up, for higher support bonuses.)

1 last use of Physic left.

Everyone will be heading down the stairs after we kill this pair of mooks.

Enemy Phase.

Curved Shot, amazing, etc. etc.

Doop.

13 Charm means Edelgard's gambits are fairly accurate now, which will be quite useful next map. (Gambit accuracy ignores terrain, IRRC.)

Strength is nice too, of course, especially since it's a multiple of 5.

The casters on this map are total jokes.

Almost.

Enemy phase combat.

Stab.

Slice.

Cheers. I guess I might as well pick up Fighter for the 8 base Str for Hubert. (If nothing else, it'll make tomes weigh him down a little less.)

Curved Shot, still being great.

Bernadetta, secretly has 100% Str and Speed growths.

Time for the good old walk of shame. (The part where you lug your 4 move losers across half the map.)

Another round of Byleth doing everything while the team watches.

Almost there.

Enemy Phase combat.

Bow exp, yay.

Actual relevant damage contribution.

He's dead, Jim. (Bernadetta has Adept. It's a pretty low chance to trigger, especially in the early game, but occasional double hits is quite nice for a damage dealer, even if unreliable.)

This is from D+ bows.

Prowess levels are quite good, giving you a bit more accuracy, avoid, and crit avoid.

You end up with 30 accuracy + avoid at max level Prowess, but I prefer the ones that give 20 avoid and 10 accuracy over the 10 avoid, 20 accuracy ones. Faith, Sword, and Brawling have that distribution. Brawling is a joke, but Faith and Sword are quite good.* You always get 10 crit avoid at level 5 prowess.

*For Byleth, anyway, most healers shouldn't be seeing enough combat for the avoid to matter.

Bow and Lance are middle of the road at 15/15, while Axes and Reason are 10/20.

New just in: Byleth does everything, again.

Pretty much done.

When Byleth is doing 4 damage with Gauntlets everyone else is healing people when they attack them. Bear that in mind before you buy Gauntlets.

(Enemy Phase combat)

Fortunately, most mooks have jack all for Res, and I made sure to save a few spells.

Doop.

Bernadetta, amazing, etc. etc.

This is part of why I don't like Petra all that much, despite her good bases & growths. (Did the combat for bow exp.)

Feeding the kill to Sylvain since Byleth and Edelgard are already past level 5, and I kind of want to grab Soldier skills before level 10.

Which nabs him a pretty great level.

Pretty convenient that the MVP was Bernadetta, although I would've preferred Byleth. (We have some 50 Motivation people still, thanks to the Seminar.)

 

[DehNutCase]

3 hours ago, Glennstavos said:

Going for armor knight bases on mages is an interesting strat. I hope it pays off. Having 12 Def around level 10 does sound enticing, but remember that level 20 magic classes also provide that base to work with. In the long term, all you gain is whichever points of Def they can pick up during those ten levels. In the short term though, it's hard to say how much that extra defense will keep them alive.

For Hubert, I like to grab archer and Hit +20 to help salvage his low accuracy spells. It also boosts his hit rate on gambits which mitigates the penalty of having lower charm than your target quite a bit. His native E+ and strength in bows makes it quick to pick up. 

I do like Hit +20 a lot, but even on Bernadetta I'm not very found of trying to pick it up. (I'm very much a mobility on everyone person.) There's only so many adjuncts you're allowed if you're not in New Game+, so getting skills in classes people aren't comfortable in is pretty annoying.

 

And mind if you cared about bulk past level 20 there's also Fortress Knight for 35 Hp, 17 Def. (Armor Knights have 30 hp*, 12 Def, so that's 50% growths for both, effectively, if you pick up Fortress.) It does take B in Axes and B in Heavy Armor, though, so it's not worth it for me. For various reasons, the game past level 20 ends up being a lot easier than the game between level 1-10, or even level 10 and 20.

*Which matters for people like Hubert, with 22 base hp.

[Zapp Branniglenn]

6 hours ago, DehNutCase said:

I do like Hit +20 a lot, but even on Bernadetta I'm not very found of trying to pick it up. (I'm very much a mobility on everyone person.) There's only so many adjuncts you're allowed if you're not in New Game+, so getting skills in classes people aren't comfortable in is pretty annoying.

Well understanding this is a grindy playthrough I would grab archer's mastery on Hubert in an auxilliary battle. Leave one mage/priest alive and fire a rusted bow at him for 50 turns with a knowledge gem to master the class.

[DehNutCase]

1 hour ago, Glennstavos said:

Well understanding this is a grindy playthrough I would grab archer's mastery on Hubert in an auxilliary battle. Leave one mage/priest alive and fire a rusted bow at him for 50 turns with a knowledge gem to master the class.

Fair enough.

Although I should mention that by 'grindy' I was mostly referring to the fact that I'll actually be doing Paralogues this time around. I think I did something like 3 non-story maps total in my Conquest run. (2 Invasions and Mozu's map, IRRC.)

[Shadow Mir]

21 hours ago, DehNutCase said:

And mind if you cared about bulk past level 20 there's also Fortress Knight for 35 Hp, 17 Def. (Armor Knights have 30 hp*, 12 Def, so that's 50% growths for both, effectively, if you pick up Fortress.) It does take B in Axes and B in Heavy Armor, though, so it's not worth it for me. For various reasons, the game past level 20 ends up being a lot easier than the game between level 1-10, or even level 10 and 20.

I would consider it impractical to try to have mages qualify for Fortress Knight, to be frank - most mages are weak in one or both of Axes and Heavy Armor, and while Armored Knight is relatively easy to qualify for, Fortress Knight would be too much work for too little profit.

[DehNutCase]

6 minutes ago, Shadow Mir said:

I would consider it impractical to try to have mages qualify for Fortress Knight, to be frank - most mages are weak in one or both of Axes and Heavy Armor, and while Armored Knight is relatively easy to qualify for, Fortress Knight would be too much work for too little profit.

Yeah, like I said, it's not really worth it. Especially since by level 20 even males have flier access, and 8 movement Paladins are available, meaning team-wide mobility should be high enough that every single combat should be on your terms.

But I should mention that Fortress Knight isn't actually that much harder than Armor Knight, because between levels 10 and 20 statue bonuses start unlocking, so you can tutor people in their weaknesses a lot easier. (Especially if you really wanted Fortress Knight bases on Byleth for some reason, and ended up getting Byleth herself to B Axes and Heavy Armor.)

Edited December 13, 2019 by DehNutCase

[DehNutCase]

Ch. 3:

 

Academy:

Spoiler

You should pretty much always say yes to these random Support level pop-ups. (They trigger when you have enough support to go up a rank with the person in question, but haven't manually triggered them yet---you can also find location based triggers during exploration.)

Motivation is refilled to full when you say yes to checking up on people, you can still pick up the Support level if you refuse, but it won't refill motivation. (Bernadetta was already max motivation, so this didn't matter.)

Sylvain's birthday, he's already recruited, so no flowers. (No flowers even if he wasn't recruited, to be honest, since he's a free recruit.)

A bunch of support levels. C rank is +2 hit/avoid compared to no support, giving us 5 hit/avoid for the support bonuses. It's also +1 MT from a bond support, which Edelgard and Hubert have between them.

Since we hit level 5 now, Certifications are unlocked. You can't reroll the numbers for a given month and character, but you can order your class changes to take advantage of them, so saving/reloading saves a bit of time and money.

This fails, for example, so I reloaded and had her learn Fighter instead.

Edelgard doesn't really need fighter, it's more just to push the numbers to the next in the series. (Since we know her first test would fail at 63%)

Sylvain has a 100% pass for Soldier, but he gets some Magic for getting Monk certification, so I test for Monk first. (If Monk failed, I would've reloaded and passed Soldier instead.)

+2 Mag. (I don't swap to Monk, though.)

I said Byleth didn't need Monk bases, but turns out both Edelgard and Byleth didn't quite have 8 Mag yet, so I toss 500g at her for more or less half a Spirit Dust.

(Also note how she can't even test for Soldier yet, and it's Soldier I want.)

+1 Mag, and I don't swap to Monk.

Golden Fish is, frankly, awful. Even for money you're better off waiting for Fistfuls of Fish or whatever it's called. (I do fish a bit this month, though, to get ingredients for food buffs.)

Choir Festival is actually useful, but my free time had to prioritize food buff and Sweet Tooth was right next to it, so...

Blessing of the Land effectively adds 5 Seeds when you're planting things, which comes out to around a 30% increase in Stat Booster odds and a handful of extra normal drops, IRRC.

If you're completely insane you can try going for Fish of Mystery on 6/22, but this early you'll probably fail if you miss the Perfect timing even once.

Exploration:

Battle is the only thing worth doing other than Exploration, but even Battle is awful this early, since we only get 1 fight right now.

 

Important non-quest stuff:

Like last time, a lot of important non-quest stuff.

Book.

+100

More book.

This should tell you Linhardt likes fishing. (+100 for all books this month)

A lot of books this week\month, and I'm not even sure I found them all.

+100

4th book.

This isn't the Black Eagle classroom, so this fishing book probably doesn't belong to Linhardt.

If you look at the time, you'll notice I didn't find this one until the last exploration session of the month. But I'm putting it here to be orderly.

A lot of books this month.

Quests:

The advice box introduction, it gives you small trickle of support points with random people, but it's probably not worth save reloading to give the right advice.

Battalion guild introduction. This early, Battalions give around 3 atk or so and 3 defense or so. (The sole flying Battalion being the one exception, giving a massive pile of stats, but a lot of things about fliers are broken.) You also get to reinforce them now, finally.

Lost and Found introduction. It's optimal to hold on to your house member's lost items so you can use them to refill motivation (they refill 50 each), but I'll probably be keeping the lost item list fairly clean.

I said that you usually don't want to wait on doing quests, but...

Faculty Training doesn't give you professor points, despite costing activity points. And professor levels is what determines how many activity points you get, so unless you're on New Game+ you should probably hold off. Unfortunately, I needed to get Soldier on Byleth, so I had to dump 600 points down the drain---600 points is like 30 or 40% of a level, which hurts, especially considering how the effects snowball... More professor points now is more professor points later from having more activity points.

Replenishing battalions to finish the guild quest. (I'll buy new ones at the start of map.)

Doop.

You can actually pick up what Jeralt's looking for before you take the quest, so don't be surprised if you can complete this quest right after getting it.

The sole note in the box was from Hubert, which didn't really matter. But you do learn that he's afraid of heights. (Personally I would've answered that the reason he can't be a Pegasus Knight was because he's male.)

You pick up a collection of Steel weapons for this month's quests, which is nice, seeing how we're still in the dark ages of everyone doubling our asses.

Not as important non-quests:

Boring drops. (Note that while you can't save/reload for stat boosters unless you reload the save from before planting, you can save/reload for normal drops---quite useful if you absolutely need a certain type of seed to drop.)

Same old setup. (I actually forget about the Greenhouse during the next exploration session, but honestly +Str isn't nearly as important as +Spd, seeing how Byleth is almost 20 Str.)

Cooking with Ashe ASAP so I can stack some cooking stats for this month's map. (RNG was really kind to me this time, but the map would've looked a lot different if, say, I missed 3 attacks in a row to start and Catherine fails to hit the broad side of a barn---which has happened to me before.)

In retrospect, it might've been better to spend this activity point doing choir, but either way I would've spent it getting support rather than motivation.

I had TWO activity points today, don't get fooled by the bar (I leveled up in the middle of exploring), so that's it for today. Being low professor level is awful.

 

Lectures:

Ferdinand can get into monk already, and he doesn't really need anything in particular, so I have him working on Authority. The highest level battalions give huge stats like +7 Atk, +7 Def, +7 Res in addition to a bunch of charm, so high Authority indirectly translates to high stats. You'd still want to prioritize class access, but if a unit is set for their class needs and don't need to pick up anything special (like Weight -3 from Heavy Armor, Dex +4 or Move +1 from Riding, or Alert Stance from Flying), then Authority is always a good go-to.

Still have no idea if I'm going to use Caspar or not, but I'll make sure he can ride a horse, at least.

Bernadetta's set for Monk, so here's a picture of taskmaster Byleth making her self-study in two weaknesses.

Like Ferdinand, Sylvain doesn't really need much, so he starts working on Authority too. (And Heavy Armor to make getting into Armor Knight a bit more reliable.)

Bernadetta doesn't really stab people that much, but Lances are important for getting into cavalry classes.

Edelgard does stab people occasionally, so lances are even more value for her. Like Byleth, she doesn't quite have 8 mag, but we'll see if I end up trying for Monk for her.

No Perfect proc, meaning we'll still need two more tutoring sessions for Seal Speed.

Lances for everyone.

(The highlighted answer is the best answer, by the way.)

Only showing this to mention that I'll more or less never listen to the students' suggestions about what to work on.

Lorenz's birthday, not in my house, so flowers.

Not Perfect, and it's quite a step down in terms of rewards.

Lances hurt more than axes for Edelgard now, although Smash does still give 20% crit. (Important if you're trying to, say, OHKO the Death Knight with a bunch of save-scumming---probably a good idea to equip Jeralt's Mercs for the extra +10% crit too.)

Smash isn't bad, but it's not nearly as good as Tempest Lance until you have the Str to hit quite hard naturally, by which time the crit and extra hit from Smash become more important than the 5 MT difference.

*Shrug*

*Shrug*

(Bernadetta has 25 motivation because she agreed with my answer to Petra.)

 

Certs:

Soldier is 100% now that Edelgard has a bit more lance exp. And I swap to it. (Soldier gives Def +2 and Reposition for Class Mastery, both of which are amazing.)

Sylvain had 100% to begin with, and I also swap him to Soldier.

 

Exploration:

Pity I forgot to use the greenhouse this week, but eh, no big loss.

Getting Soldier isn't reliable, so I wanted a few shots at it rather than just one, meaning I had to do this quest early. -200 Professor Points. Proper min-maxing probably involves sitting on this quest for another month or two, until you're high professor level. (You'll be forced into sword classes, but Myrmidon into Thief isn't exactly awful, just not as stellar as Soldier into Pegasus Knight or Cavalier.)

Getting tutored in Faith would make getting Annette and Lysithea easier, but I'll probably be waiting for their random join requests in the middle of lecture anyway. (This only happens after you reach B-rank support with them, and only once. If you refuse you'll need to have the stats to recruit them normally.)

We won't see fliers for a while yet, so I won't be using this much. (It has 3 MT, 20 Hit, 5% crit in addition to flying effectiveness, so it's occasionally useful if accuracy is an issue even outside of fighting fliers, at the cost of 1 more durability compared to Wrath Strike.)

If either Jeralt or Seteth gave me a Great lesson I would've only needed to spend 1 activity point. (I would've saved/reloaded and learned from Seteth if he gave the Great lesson.)

But both of them were only the regular 'good' result. -400 Professor Points.

Motivation is an issue now since people are running out, so I start handing out gifts like popcorn. Dorothea doesn't love any of these, so she only gets 75 Motivation total.

(You get +25 for something they like, +50 for something they love, and they'll refuse gifts they dislike.)

More important to get to support rank B than to save lost items for Motivation later, so I start handing them out. (Leonie)

Raphael.

Caspar

Hanneman

If you don't know who this belongs to I have no words.

Annette

 

Lectures:

We're running low on motivated students, so tutoring is less than perfectly efficient.

Picking up some Axe exp so that she'll be a bit luckier and more accurate the next map.

Petra and Ferdinand are slowly falling behind at the moment, but this game heavily favors focusing on a few core units than leveling everyone. Partly because getting to level 10, 20, and 30* unlocks new shop items, like higher tier weapons, which significantly boost the performance of the whole team, which encourages over-leveling a few key units. But also because up until Part 2 you can recruit steadily higher level replacements for people who are falling behind.

*Not 100% sure on level 30, it could also be based on getting to Part 2.

Linhardt doesn't learn any more Faith based offensive spells, so I'll probably swap him to either picking up Reason D or just Riding forever. It takes rank A riding to get into the mage cavalry classes, which is more or less a whole game affair to reach unless you're coming in from the physical side. Lorenz picks up Dark Knight more or less for free, for example, but he doesn't need it anyway, seeing how Paladin has 1 more movement and a similar stat spread.

Bernadetta's catching up in Heavy Armor exp, now that she's studying it in her free time.

Authority is +2 MT for gambits per level. Each point of Charm gives 5% accuracy, and five points gives 1 more damage, I believe. (Physical gambits also use Str, and magical gambits Mag, at the standard 1 more damage per point.)

This fixes Petra's damage issues a little, but for various reasons getting into melee range with her is still a bad idea.

This early, Charm is way more important than Authority, since gambits are still quite shaky in terms of accuracy. (We don't have high Support Ranks for good accuracy bonuses---every support rank gives 5% hit for gambits, and 1 extra MT, and our team's Charm is still pretty low.)

Once our roster starts getting huge I'll probably skill the individual skill updates and just post the Results summary, unless a particular skill is especially good/important.

Edelgard's birthday. She's in my house, so no flowers.

We ran out of seals, so I start shopping for more. Buying Intermediate Seals since I'll be using like 2-3 per person for stat boosts, and we don't get unlimited purchases until someone hits level 20. (Locked to 3 a month right now.)

Beginner Seals are always unlimited, so I just buy a handful for now.

I tried picking up Soldier, but I failed the 66%, so I grabbed Myrmidon for Byleth to advance this month's numbers.

Myrmidon doesn't offer much, but it does give 5% Speed and 10% Hp growths in exchange for -5% Res compared to Noble, compared to Commoner it also has 5% Charm. Unfortunately, it also has the 2nd lowest Str bases at 7 out of the level 5 classes (Monk has the lowest at 4), and the mastery skills are +2 Speed (which is, mind, pretty amazing), and Swap (not nearly as good as reposition or drag back).

Soldier has 5% Dex at the cost of Myrmidon's Speed, and Fighter 5% Str. (Monk is a total oddball in that it gets 5% Hp and 5% Res relative to Noble.)

 

I do swap to Myrmidon, since I don't mind the class if I fail to get Soldier, but Reposition is pretty amazing throughout the game, considering you can Canto afterwards.

 

Exploration:

Motivation is running low, so I start bonding with my house.

Byleth isn't a good enough professor to tutor a lot of people right now, so she shares a meal with Lysithea and Felix. As a mage Lysithea suffers from not having any 3 range spells, but in exchange she has a nice collection of effective damage and lots of offensive spells in both Faith and Reason. Felix is Petra, except with a Bernadetta tier personal for the early game, and 15% higher Str growths for the rest of it.

(This makes him significantly better than Petra, but I won't be recruiting him early enough to matter. Felix is a food-locked, sword-locked recruit later in the game, which makes him a lot less appealing than someone like Ingrid or Leonie, even if he hits harder.)

Sharing meals got us some support levels between our house members.

Doop.

I also finally remember about the garden.

Rocky Burdock is the +1 Str stat booster, so this is pretty great.

Don't mess with what works---at least until I find some Nordsalat.

Unless you're seriously cash staved, it's probably a good idea to always use the best possible option here.

 

Lectures:

Dorothea probably would've picked up Thoron without any more tutoring, but eh.

3 range spell, which is nice considering the next map has a lot of people in forests trying to gank the people you're trying to escort.

(Officially, the knights are here to escort us, unofficially, they're a bunch of suicidal jackasses, aside from Catherine, who's a fancy, indestructible showoff who prefers to spam Combat Arts over using a Brave Weapon properly.)

More lances. Once Bernadetta gets C lances she'll be more or less set until level 30, meaning we'll be free to grab whatever we want for her.

Picking up D+ Axes for the next rank of Prowess.

The avoid more or less doesn't matter, but the extra hit rate and crit avoid definitely does.

We had some leftover motivation, so back to lances we go.

Linhardt doesn't see enough combat for him to need more offensive spells, really, but I'll probably pick up Wind for him eventually anyway.

Doesn't really matter.

Unlike with Bernadetta, this refill comes in quite handy.

I actually could've gotten this support earlier, but I waited until after tutoring so it refills her motivation.

Having someone good at a Group Task makes it pretty likely to get Perfects. (Ferdinand and Lorenz has a 100% chance to get Perfect on stable duty once they hit B-rank support.)

Hubert picks up spells quite quickly, which is nice. Banshee has high MT and also reduces movement by 5, which tends to make people completely immobile this early. It's a great spell, but extremely heavy (9 weight) and only middling in terms of accuracy.

You're still benched, Caspar. It's quite sad, if he had just 1 more Str or Speed in his bases he'd probably be quite nice, which would give him a chance to get levels to get out of the hell he starts in.

*shrug*

I can swap Edelgard out of flying now, and Sylvain out of Heavy Armor, but I'm not 100% sure I'll remember.

Support B means Hubert and Bernadetta will be getting Perfects really easily, pity we'll probably be having a different pair doing Group Tasks soon.

Passed this time, and I swap to Soldier.

 

Exploration:

I start doing the greenhouse first, now, so I don't forget about it.

Don't mess with what works.

I finally remember that I meant to stack food buffs.

I could've stacked 4 buffs this month, but I only had 1 Speed fish and 1 Defense fish anyway, so I got the most important bits. +1 Def and +1 Speed will help a lot, this early.

(Pity I forgot to ask Annette to help out before cooking---cooking bonuses aren't retroactive.)

Any mage would've done (everyone will have Heal and some offensive spells this early), but Annette also happens to have Rally Strength (and Resistance), so she has a bit more utility.

I sell some stuff for a bit of change.

Dex isn't a bad stat, but +2 dex isn't worth cooking for, in my opinion.

Luck is actually a great stat, but not everyone needs it, and +2 is a little too small.

Oh, and apparently sharing meals with Lysithea and Annette got them support C before I managed to get C for Byleth and Lysithea.

 

Map:

Spoiler

Suggested Level: 5, it says, when I have exactly 3 units at or past that level out of a team of 9. (Technically 4, if we include Annette.)

 

Pre-Map Planning:

Oh, hey, we don't have any enemies. Or rather, we don't see any enemies.

Someone at IS might really like Fog of War maps and escort missions, because this map is both. (You get the best reward if none of your allies die. There are people who can crit-kill your allies from full hp on this map.)

Meet Catherine, she's level 12, but has stats closer to a level 17, Sword-faire, and a 13 MT Brave Sword.

She also hates using Brave Weapons, because rather than hitting people four times she insists on using this move every single time. Foudroyant Strike isn't a bad Combat Art, all things considered, but I'll take a 'combat art' that hits 4 times and costs 4 durability over one single hit of +6 MT, +30 Accuracy, +30 Crit, thank you.

Thanks to her personal she has effectively 18 defense, so nothing should scratch her on this map.

These guys are the mooks you're escorting. They like to follow Catherine, attack people who will KO them on the counter, and run into the Dark Mage who's supposedly hidden by the Fog of War but they totally can see (just not attack).

The Dark Mage + 1 extra mook tends to KO them, IRRC.

They're fast enough not to get doubled, but also unlucky enough that they see positive crit rates, and squishy enough that an Axe crit will deal 36 damage. They have 31 hp.

 

We can't see anything else on the map, not even the enemy we'll see immediately after starting the map, so we'll move on.

And here's Annette's stats, compared to her level 1 bases she got +1 Hp, +1 Str, +2 Mag, +2 Dex, +1 Speed, +1 Luck, +1 Def, +3 Res, and +2 Charm. Not really stellar improvement for 4 levels, but we don't really care that much about her stats anyway.

She has Heal, Wind, Cutting Gale, and her Rallies to bring to the table.

Oh, and the archers ORKO her on this map, unless you knew to swap to Wind or Heal, not that we'd know about it until\unless it happens, seeing how we don't actually see any archers right now.

Equipment:

Gotta sell some Bullion for cash.

Turns out it's the Very Large Bullion that sells for 10k, the Large Bullion is only 5k. Still more than enough cash for our purposes, though.

This is secretly a C or B Authority Battalion, it has 4 Phys Atk, 5 Avo, 2 Prt, 5 Res, and 5 Charm at max level. Assembly is your typical gambit, except it pulls people back with you. I tend to be forgetful about it, but it's quite good for getting people off fort tiles, like the boss of this map. Assuming, that is, the enemy isn't immune to reposition effects.

Byleth and Edelgard has D rank Authority right now, everyone else has E.

Accuracy is important on this map, so I pick up some archers. Notably, the gambit has a range of 2-3 (and, despite the Bow Range penalty icon appearing when you try to attack from 3 range, it doesn't lose 20 hit for it).

At max level it has 3 Phys Atk, -2 Mag, 15 Hit, 3 Prt, and 3 Charm. Not Pegasus tier, but not bad.

Probably the best or second best battalion in the game, thanks to Stride. (The other one also has Stride, but has better stats in exchange for a way higher Authority requirement.) More than doubles our mobility this early in the game. My main issue with Battalions is that I have a hard time remember who has what, so I tend to stick Stride on either my Dancer or my Rally bot.

It's ideal to have it on a Canto unit, who can move after using their Gambit, but it's harder to remember for me.

The stat bonuses don't matter.

We already have one of these, but I'm buying another one because their stats are pretty decent for this early in the game.

At max level Serios Mercs gives 3 Phys Atk, -2 Mag, +10 Hit, +2 Prt, and +1 Charm, which is a nice pile of useful stats.

Random Shot has a nice area of effect, but the stats on these guys aren't too stellar. Just remember that they give 4 Phys Atk at max level and you know everything important about Empire Warriors.

Empire Brawlers trade -1 Res (which doesn't matter this early) and having a worse Gambit in exchange for getting +10 Avo at max level. Again, though, the most important thing is that they give +4 Phys Atk at max level.

Byleth gets the Pegasus Knights. The other option was archers, but Edelgard has better charm for the archer gambit.

Accuracy is important.

This is a temporary downgrade for Bernadetta, but Curved Shot will cover accuracy issues for now and after a few levels Empire Warriors will add more Atk than Serios Mercs.

Serios Mercs for Sylvain.

Churc of Serios Soldiers gives +3 Prt, +3 Rsl at max level, and also +5 hit. But the reason Hubert is getting them is because they don't penalize magic attack, and having a battalion lets him start getting some Authority exp.

Our other Serios Mercs for Petra.

Linhardt gets Holy Monks because they don't penalize Magic Atk, and it's easier for me to remember where they are if they're on a healer.

Dorothea gets Jeralt's since they don't penalize Mag.

Caspar's benched and Annette isn't in our House yet, so we don't/can't give them Battalions.

Byleth picks up a odd collection of weapons.

Edelgard mixes some lances in with her Axes.

I remembered about the Steel Lance I got from a quest, so I give it to Petra in case she ever gets to stab someone.

I buy a Steel Bow for Bernadetta because I forgot about the one we got from a quest earlier. (Weird that I remembered the lance but not the bow, but oh well.)

We also buy her another training bow just in case she ends up running out on the other one.

Ferdinand is still level 1, i.e. the least useful person on our team, so he's on Torch carrying duties.

 

Map Start:

Immediately when the map starts, we end up being able to see the first enemy on the map.

16 Atk, 11 As, not too strong, compared to the 16 Atk, 14 AS guys we've already dealt with, but these guys aren't really the real threats on this map anyway.

They're more or less equally matched against the ally mooks that are supposedly escorting us, but note how they have 9 Luck, meaning our enemies don't see positive crit rates.

This is an escort mission, so I use stride to get people in position to protect our idiotic allies.

The best part about this map is that even with a torch, by the time you can see archers they're in range to hit attack you. They can attack you even if you don't see them with a torch, too.

Wait, I did I say 'best'? I meant the opposite of that.

(Remember, the archers on this map are perfectly capable of ORKOing your mages this early, and mages are the only people who can hit with any real accuracy in the bushes.)

And we suddenly see a bit more mooks.

17 Atk, 8 AS, not too much of a problem for a front-liners, but they're archers with huge reach, and certain tomes are heavy enough that these guys will be doubling our mages. To death.

They also have this joke of a battalion.

Even with Magic, these attacks aren't anywhere near the reliable side. (This map would've been a lot harder if I got the ordinary amount of misses. It was a breeze this time, but only because I got lucky, not because of anything I did.)

This would've been a good place to use Grounder, if I remembered to have Byleth eat the +1 Str herb and also remembered about Grounder.

Moving Bernadetta up so the archer shoots her.

Everyone shuffles forward, but not too much left and not too much up. (There's a lot of mooks in there, not that you'd know unless you've played the map before.)

Fog of War Escort Missions, because either one by themselves weren't stupid enough to begin with.

Sylvain is made of bricks at this point. (Enemy phase combat)

Oh hi, Archer I couldn't possibly have seen without putting Ferdinand in range to get his ass KOd.

Oh hi, other Archer I couldn't possibly have seen. (The map has a lot of those.)

This would be a moral reset in any other game. (Byleth dodges.)

But this game has divine pulse so I won't be incrementing the counter until I run out of Pulse charges.

Have I mentioned I hate this map? Because I hate this map. There's no 'strategy' involved because you can't realistically plan for enemy positioning and stats unless you scout the map beforehand to remove the fog of war aspect via save scumming. And if that's intended, why bother having the fog in the first place?

Catherine is fast enough double these guys, but she'd prefer to risk it all on Foudroyant Strike rather than just hitting them four times with her stupidly lethal brave weapon. (I'm extremely lucky this map, usually Catherine misses half her hits or thereabouts,while her mooks keep trying to kill themselves.)

Two roll means 60% isn't as bad as it looks, but it's still pretty damn bad. You'd still miss about 30% of the time or so, I believe, but I haven't done the math.

And here's why you bring mages (ideally 3 range mages) to this map.

(She missed, though.)

So Hubert goes in to clean up. If you're even slightly unlucky these 2RKOs turn into 3 or 4RKOs, and this map becomes nearly unplayable*, because you only have 9 units.

*Assuming you're trying to keep those suicidal ally mooks alive.

Ferdinand moves up to scout, note that I'm keeping him close to my main formation so I can move units to block for him if necessary, because an archer + anyone else = dead Ferdinand.

And we instantly see someone who'd seriously mess up Ferdinand's day if allowed.

I messed up the screenshot, but it's a pretty bad battalion.

Edelgard hits, which simplifies the turn a lot.

Healing Byleth because even she's 3RKOd on this map.

This hits, and, because Sylvain was behind Byleth, I don't remember that Assembly pulls people back until the next time I use it.

Bernadetta never got hit on EP, since the archer who was supposed to hit her saw a kill on Byleth, so this combat's safe to take.

The archer was going to attack Bernadetta anyway on enemy phase, so I heal her up.

This map is pretty easy if you can take it slowly, but if you do the suicidal ally mooks are going to kill themselves.

Note the 4% crit chance. A crit + a hit from the merc is a dead ally.

Bernadetta refuses to have her personal active, but her stellar levels to this point means that her combat's pretty decent regardless.

This hits, of course, meaning Sylvain's also stuck on 0 move. (Which I forgot about during my turn.)

Note the 3% crit, and how lethal it would've been.

Now, this Fouroyant Strike I can get behind, since the hit rate would've been 18% otherwise, but most of the time she'd be better off just attacking normally.

(Her killing this mook at all is me being majorly lucky despite that, though.)

It's a good thing this archer was here, because this mook is perfectly happy to suicide on the mercs if he has nothing else to hit.

I hope you like seeing positive crit rates on mission critical units.

Yeah Bernadetta's seeing a 1% crit rate too, but who cares.

(She dodges the counter anyway.)

Using mire to make the KO easier.

Thoron doesn't have a lot of uses, especially in a class with halved spell slots, but it was nice while it lasted. (It was most important for clearing the 3 mooks hiding inside the bushes anyway.)

I forgot about Assembly dragging people back when I used this.

The stupid part? This is actually a decent move anyway, I just can't tell because I can't see how many enemies are there to the left.

Byleth got a level up, but I tapped a button during the combat so it went to the 'skip level up screen' mode. (I'll be doing that a lot this map.)

Compared to level 6 Byleth got +1 Str, +1 Mag, +1 Dex, +1 Speed, +1 Luck, and +1 Charm, I believe, so it was a great level.

Curved shot is great.

So's tempest lance.

Annette is doubled by archers (which would kill her) if she's holding Cutting Gale, so I have her equip heal. (Which has 0 Wt.)

I move Ferdinand a tiny bit forward so I can actually see.

Not much up north, so I have Annette heal our suicidal allies.

Linhardt also holds heal for not getting his ass doubled purposes.

Fortunately +1 Def food buff means Dorothea barely avoids the ORKO. (I had expected Sylvain to be able to kill this guy, but I forgot he got Gambit'd.)

Healing Byleth since she's pretty exposed. The Dark Mage causing the fog is in the bushes to her left, not that you'd know that until your idiot allies suicide into him.

They'll straight up walk right next to the dark mage despite not being able to see him, just so they can get themselves 2RKOd.

Sylvain can't do anything, so he just waits.

The hard part is over at this point, since most of the archers are gone. Not that you'd know that.

Enemy Phase combat.

This hits, again.

(Imagine how much harder this map would be if Catherine never hit anything the whole map---it's almost as likely as what happened this map, where she lands every hit.)

Ferdinand's torch ran out, so he walks up to re-light it.

This guy's stats are pretty awful, but Seal Strength can occasionally cause you to get doubled, and he does have Heart Seeker to help his allies hit you more accurately. He also has 106 hit, so pretty accurate.

Some of the mooks on this map are weaker than others.

And some of them are perfectly capable of OHKOing our stupid ass allies with a crit.

Doing some minor patching up now that I've confirmed the area is mostly safe.

-100g

I... didn't mean to do this. I meant to test whether Fusillade lost accurate at 3 range, since the bow penalty icon appeared, but then I fat fingered it and had Edelgard use it at 2 range.

(She hits, which was lucky---I got a lot of luck this map.)

Byleth needs 3 hits to KO, which was pretty unlikely, but I knew I could have people following up. Gauntlets are more or less designed to kill mages, the problem is that a training sword also would've ORKOd, this just does more damage on a 'fail case,' since I have 4 tries to hit him rather than 2.

Spoilers, Byleth murders him.

As you can see, if our allies or I moved up even a single square more, another Archer would've ran in to mess us up. This map is trivial once you can see, because you actually know who and what you're fighting.

Pretty great stats, dead to every single mage in a single round, more or less. Note the armored blow, this guy has 25 Defense when attacking. (His battalion gives +3 Prt.)

Pretty great Battalion, I wouldn't mind having this on my team at all, especially the 7 Charm for dodging enemy gambits.

This guy, on the other hand, is a joke.

Ditto.

Your stupid suicidal mooks can and will run up to suicide on this guy, so make sure someone's standing below the boss, so your stupid ass allies don't kill themselves on him. (And wow that battalion is awful.)

His gambit is pretty painful, thanks to his level 3 authority*, but he suffers from the same gambit accuracy issues we do.

*At E rank Authority, somehow... Don't get me started on the level 3 Lance Prowess at D rank lances either.

But back to our mooks, everything's more or less safe in our little corner, so I continue patching us up.

The Dark Mage is the real boss of the map, since the map is trivial even considering your suicidal allies once you can actually see.

(They are still very much at risk of getting crit killed, but we have Divine Pulse.)

Enemy Phase Combat.

D+ Authority, not very useful.

'I'm helping,' he says, running up to try and kill himself.

Getting some poke in.

Ferdinand doesn't do much this map, directly, but torch carrying was a pretty important job.

More patching up.

I could go for the OHKO with a Combat Art, but this way I'd apply some chip damage at least if I miss the OHKO. (I miss one of the attacks.)

Physic is a great spell.

Iron Axes are inaccurate enough that Tempest Lance + Training Lance is more accurate than Iron Axe + Smash, I believe, but Lance exp was more important anyway.

Missed the level up screenshot again. (Note the 7 Mag I'm too lazy to fix, maybe I'll tutor her a bit in Reason to get her Monk later.)

This is +1 Hp, +1 Str, +1 Speed, +1 Defense, +1 Charm compared to level 5, I believe, so basically an amazing level.

Shuffling people around a bit to take enemy phase combats.

Doop.

Holding heal is pretty nice for face tanking.

Oh man, getting doubled as an Maddening mook must be embarrassing.

Ouch.

Surprisingly, the militia chooses to smack Bernadetta in counter range for better accuracy. I previously thought they'd prefer to avoid the counter if possible, but I guess they only do that if the combat would take off a significant portion of their hp.

I mean, I appreciate how Catherine is the only ally mook who actually contributes, but this map would be a lot easier + more rewarding (exp wise) if I could just order them to stand in a corner.

Banshee's high MT coming in handy for a OHKO.

Missed a level up again.

This is +1 Hp, +1 Mag, +1 Def, +1 Res I believe. Pretty much only the Mag and Res matters, due to Armor Knight, although it will make him a bit less squishy for the next few maps. Speed is looking like it'll be an issue come level 10 (and Dex as well), so I'll probably be picking up Thief for him.

Doop.

Linhardt doing not-Linhardt things.

Managed to grab this screenshot, fortunately. More or less a 'short term' stat boost since most of Linhardt's bases will be fixed with level 10 classes. (The Mag is great, though.)

Annette's a Monk, so she has more healing spells than Linhardt despite not having Physic (ever) or Mend.

Mostly just a race against our ally mooks to get to the boss before they can suicide themselves on him.

Some of the enemy mooks have pretty awful stats compared to others, hence the Petra double. (Enemy Phase combat.)

She picks up +5 Hp too, which is great.

Also enemy phase.

On the minus side, that's 1 less kill for my team. On the plus side, Catherine backtracking means it'll be pretty easy to get to the boss first.

'I'm helping,' he saying, not caring about the 3% chance to get murdered from full hp..

At least this guy isn't dead to a crit.

Sure is nice to have lots of spell slots.

More patching up.

Poke.

Mostly healing this guy for exp.

I decide to send some people top right later to pick up the archer + lancer for exp but for now it's still about getting to the boss before our suicidal allies.

Enemy Phase combat.

Catherine casually stealing more kills.

Oh well, more patching up and it's back to advancing.

The mooks will all aggro at once, so even though only 1 person will be able to hit Byleth they'll all move in range to get murdered.

More patching up.

Our team is pretty separated, which will cost me a few turns later.

Interesting that this guy attacked, rather than the Armor Knight who'll take 0 damage. Byleth might be strong, but 25 Defense is still a bit of a high ask right now. (He hits.)

I would've liked to the kill the armor knight myself, he probably gives more exp than the other two mooks, but whatever.

As my first set of moves I move Hubert in position to counter the archer. (I'm not sure if the 4 extra strength from Annette's rally puts him out of double range, but it couldn't hurt.)

Starting to get enough damage to consistently 2HKO now, which will make things easier.

Byleth could ORKO him at this point, but I'm just farming some exp.

It does also save me 3 weapon uses, since neither Byleth nor Sylvain had to use a combat art this way.

Doop.

Poke.

More exp farming.

And Linhardt picks up the kill.

Catherine won't attack the boss, I believe, but her mooks are quite happy to kill themselves on him.

Enemy Phase combat, Hubert hits, the other guy misses.

Miasma is lighter than Mire, so Hubert doesn't need anything special to avoid doubles using it. He misses, though.

This side will probably turn into a mess if the archer stays alive, so I have Annette add some chip.

There goes our last Stride.

And Bernadetta marches in for a fairly shaky KO. (She lands her shot, though.)

Stride gave Byleth enough move to get into the trees up here.

Note Edelgard up here to start making a wall for Dorothea.

And dead.

Pretty decent level, although it'd be better with Speed.

The mook prefers to hit Edelgard rather than Sylvain since Sylvain's pretty tanky right now.

Enemy Phase combat.

Got to love random 3% chances to be forced to use a Divine Pulse.

But the mook didn't crit, so Catherine murders him on her phase.

Pictured, someone who really, really wants to die.

Banshee lands, so this side is more or less cleaned up.

This misses, but it's not like the guy can do anything on his turn.

So I patch Hubert up rather than try to kill the mook.

I moved Byleth for the Professor exp, then give Edelgard the kill.

Authority D+, which gives level 2 Authority, IRRC.

I regret wasting this heal later, since Linhardt is close to empty, but eh.

Most of our ranged damage is currently busy farming to the right, so we can't really do a lot of damage right now, but we're at least in position to prevent our allies from killing themselves.

And Hubert picks up the kill here.

Last of Linhardt's heal uses, in retrospect I should've just used a Vulnerary, as a just in case.

He's not wrong. (Hp and Dex are both stats that'll get fixed by the Armor Knight + Thief combo.)

This is an important place to stand if you don't your allies killing themselves.

Lonato heals for something like 11/12 hp a turn, so this doesn't really do anything except farm exp.

Bow Exp.

Minor chip damage + trying to bait Lonato into using his Javelin, which is weaker and heavier than his Iron Lance.

Almost over.

Edelgard is pretty charming, so this misses.

This... was stupid.

Because of this.

Divine Pulse: 2

Oh well.

So I just have the team take a turn off to chug some Vulneraries.

Minor spell exp.

More bow exp.

We can see our ranged damage dealers slowly making there way over.

Instead of murdering Byleth, Lonato decides to miss Edelgard. (Since Byleth isn't in lethal range this time around.)

Moved Sylvain below Lonato in the hopes that him being tankier would persuade Lonato to Javelin Edelgard instead, but he doesn't bite.

If I had an Assembly still Lonato wouldn't take so much effort, since I can just drag him off the healing tile.

(He has General, which halves Gambit damage and negates instant death, but it doesn't prevent movement effects.)

No more gambits, so Byleth is free to start smacking Lonato again.

Moved Sylvain away since he's not that great at smacking people around, compared to Edelgard.

Hubert was pretty close to level 5, so I wasn't using Combat Arts in the hopes that he makes it up here in time to pick up the kill.

Enemy Phase combat.

Things that give exp raise Support between Byleth and whoever you asked to help out in a mission, I believe, so healers should have a easy time getting support with Byleth.

Putting Bernadetta here in the hopes Lonato finally starts using his Javelin.

Which gets her Authority E+.

-100g

Doop.

Weird level, but, again, I do like Byleth having Defense. No matter what she'll have 11 Speed max at level 10, though, which is unfortunate.

10 Defense is about the point where I don't bother getting Byleth Armor Knight, since it costs a lot of Professor points to grab it, even if it makes recruiting certain characters easier. (By the time Professor Points no longer matter I'll need the free time to do Paralogues.)

Slow and steady wins the race, or something.

The 1% crit is spooky, but we do still have 2 Divine Pulses left.

Setting up the kill for next turn. (Whoever Lonato attacks, he'll drop to OHKO range.)

Last of Annette's heals.

Doop.

Enemy Phase combat.

Hubert... misses.

I take it as a sign and just have Edelgard take the kill instead, but in retrospect I should've have just Divine Pulsed for it.

Imagine being so inaccurate you miss 90% hit odds in a two roll system...

Level 5 is significantly more important than whatever Edelgard gets, but this is a pretty good level anyway.

(This is political speak for 'your allies didn't manage to kill themselves.')

Dex is pretty mediocre, but you do need it as a physical class.

Goddess Icons are still 4 Luck, I believe, which make them significantly better than Secret Books. We're even back to the old 1 Luck = 1 Crit Avoid system.

The map was pretty smooth, but that had nothing to do with my skill (or lack thereof) at the game, I just got bloody lucky.

 

[DehNutCase]

Missed a pair of screenshots on Turn 6, after Dorothea smacks a mook and before Linhardt kills someone. Edit bug means I can't edit long posts, so here they go.

tl;dr is that Bernadetta feathered someone and got her first 'average' level of the game.

Spoiler

 

[Shadow Mir]

On 12/11/2019 at 1:55 AM, DehNutCase said:

Only has 40% speed growths, like Edelgard and Linhardt, making the three of them the slowest units in the Black Eagles, but Sword Proficiency means she's guaranteed 11 Dex, 11 Speed at level 10. Charm of 8 means that, as far as I know, she can win the Dance Contest with just her level 1 bases.

Her Faith hidden talent is a lie---her only offensive Faith spell is Nosferatu. Like Hubert, she picks up a 3-range spell extremely early. Picks up some really nasty stuff like Meteor later on in Reason, too.

Notably, has a Bond support with Manuela.

In fact, I would say while the skill obtained from it isn't useful, that faith budding talent does make it easier to get Dorothea into her best class.

[DehNutCase]

Ch. 3:

 

Academy:

Spoiler

He's in my house, so no flowers. We're getting tea parties this month, though, so we'll be throwing tea parties for everyone, regardless of house, later.

The motivation refill from support level going up is extremely useful this early, seeing how we're aren't good enough at Professoring to have a ton of free time for motivation refills via eating.

House members always have at least supports up to level B, so if you keep your team mostly members of one house accuracy is rarely an issue.

This fails.

We'll grab Monk later. Bernadetta changes to Soldier. 5 levels isn't quite enough to get enough Soldier exp to master it, so we'll probably be picking up Soldier's mastery skills via adjunct exp later.

Grabbing this for extra Strength. (5 Strength per effective speed is pretty awful, but Beginner Seals are only 500g, and I'd gladly pay 2500g per Speed.)

And Linhardt even gets 3 Strength off the deal. (Brigands have 10 base Strength at level 10, and it's basically free if you're going for Armor Knight anyway. It's pretty rare that you don't get 2 strength in 5 levels, though, even for Mages.)

 

Exploration:

It's big fish day. The most useful fish day this early, since the Speed fish and the Defense fish are both fished from the red fish, but later on the fistful of fish* and mystery fish days are more important.

*Strictly speaking, fistful of fish is always better, but those days don't happen until a bit more into the game.

Important non-quest stuff:

This isn't always Nordsalat. And you can actually get it a few months earlier than right now. Remember when I had Boa Fruit Seeds quite early? Yeah, turns out I probably could've just rerolled for Nordsalat at the node where I picked those up. It's the same location, just a way earlier month.

Like I've mentioned before, Nordsalat occasionally gives Speed Carrots when planted. But they also give significantly more Professor exp than the Mixed Herbs and whatnot, since it's a way higher quality seed.

Had to save-reload quite a bit for the Nordsalat (I got it in my first reroll, but forgot to screenshot it), so I was looking at this screen a lot.

Only two books this month, I believe.

But they're 300 Professor Points each.

It's pretty hard to miss them, since they're right next to some quest objectives.

+300

 

Quests:

Tea Party quest, and it also tells you have Ferdinand and Lorenz are probably pretty close.

Free Concoction. A step down from getting Steel Weapons, but I'll take it.

Everyone likes Owl Feathers, meaning they'll always be a nice chunk of Support Points and also 50 motivation if the giftee is already in your house.

Tournament quest. The Tournament gives 300 Professor Points, and is repeatable, meaning this is probably where most of my activity points will go until I'm max leveled in Professoring.

Quest that involve giving an item to someone else has the same mechanics as giving a 'liked' gift, which is a pretty nice bonus.

Doop.

A bit of running around later.

Ditto.

Early on the tournaments are all physical, so Edelgard obliterates them unless you've been sleeping on her.

(She's strong enough to make it through the whole tournament without having to heal right now, which is convenient.)

The free Steel Axe is also nice. (Meat tends to sell for a lot more than fish or plants, something to bear in mind if you ever get really cash starved.)

 

Non-Quests:

I asked Ignatz to help out, in the hopes that, like Annette, he has his first Authority based rally already. (Annette has 2 rallies, but that's because of her personal.)

Nope. Turns out you have to recruit him and tutor a bit if you wanted Rally Speed, which made face-tanking the Death Knight a way bigger hassle.

(Reliably killing the Death Knight does not involve face tanking him, it involves hilariously annoying AI manipulation, but I'll take a rain check on that, thank you.)

So I reset the game and asked someone less useless to help.

Annette's level 7 now, and she's +2 HP, +2 Str, +3 Mag, +3 Dex, +2 Speed, +2 Luck, +1 Def, +4 Res, and +2 Charm compared to level 1. Not exactly amazing for 6 more levels, but acceptable.

I actually did this before doing the tournament, if you're keeping careful track of my activity points. Head Chef Challenge is just like it says, it's pretty random whether someone likes the meal or not, and they don't tell you beforehand. It should give extra Support Points compared to just sharing a regular meal people liked, but it's hard to tell.

Sharing with Ignatz and Lysithea since I was considering trying to somehow recruit Ignatz and tutoring him for Rally Speed.

It gave us rank C with Lysithea. Unfortunately we need a lot of Faith levels to recruit her based on stats and skill ranks, so we still need 1 more support level to recruit her.

I didn't know how much Attack Speed the Death Knight had, but I knew it was a bloody lot. I googled a video for it which made me think it was 16 AS, but that video was on a lower difficulty. (The Death Knight has 17 AS on Maddening.)

Either way, though, without Rally Speed I needed to stack multiple Speed buffs to avoid him having a guaranteed ORKO on everyone.

I had enough motivation for some decent tutoring sessions, so I capped the day off with another tournament. You don't get 'special' reward for the month for wins after the first, but you do still get the prize money and 300 Professor Points, so early on tournament grinding is pretty damn important.

 

Lectures:

Swapped Edelgard to reason for a week to pick up Monk for her.

Linhardt doesn't need more faith for the time being, so I had him work on Swords and Axes to get him some extra Dex and Speed at level 10.

Bow proficiency isn't too important for the moment, so I had Petra working on Authority instead.

Ditto for Sylvain and Heavy Armor. (D is all you need for Armor Knight.)

You get 20 skill exp for a week's study, so I'm only tutoring her in reason until she hits 20 to next level.

Which happened quite quickly.

Having higher ranks of Prowess is quite useful for anyone with shaky accuracy or Luck, so this is nice for Edelgard.

Tutoring Authority since Bernadetta doesn't really need much at the moment, but a high Authority level will be helpful later.

Going for Swords since Byleth has a bonus in the area, and Linahrdt wants it.

Meh.

In retrospect I should've set her Reason focus to Authority as well, since the mage Battlions are D rank or higher, but eh.

Doesn't really matter, since all battalions are physical right now, meaning she'll hit for 0 or close to it no matter what, even if we assume she's hitting things.

It's unfortunate that Edelgard's support levels are time gated, since some Motivation refill would be quite helpful right now. But the +50 here means I can just Owl Feather her to 100.

Yes I'll take some free Professor points, thank you.

Dorothea and Caspar, so this is +150, I believe.

From what I've seen it seems like the most likely chance of getting Charm happens at the Great tea-time level rather than the other 3. (Fail, Nice, Great, Perfect.) This was a Perfect tea time, so it was a lot of support, but, unfortunately, no Charm.

The RNG numbers for getting charm seem to be set at the start of month, at least for birthday based tea times, but you can save scum to try all 4 levels if you want to. I never bother, since it's a hassle to have to replay a whole week. I do save/reload for tea times during exploration, though.

Almost time to swap to a different team for Group Tasks, which is a pity.

*shrug*

*shrug*

Not useless, but lances are good enough that Ferdinand probably won't be carrying axes around for a long while yet, if ever.

This is great, especially since it works on the Death Knight, but I actually forgot about it until I actually got the point where I'm trying to kill the guy.

Knightkneeler is 5 MT, 15 Hit, for 4 Durability, and effective versus Cavalry, so a pretty amazing Combat Art overall, trading 3 MT for 5% hit and 1 less durability cost compared to Tempest Lance, even when the effective damage isn't important. Combat Arts make weapons 2x effective, not 3x effective like actual effective weapons, I believe, but I'm not 100% sure. But even at 2x effective a Silver Weapon would have enough MT to be more or less the same damage as a regular effective weapon anyway, thanks to their higher base MT.

Our Authority levels are a bit lower than I'd like, and it makes Battalion distribution a bit annoying (especially the part where our mages have physical battalions), but that'll get fixed quite quickly once everyone has enough Axe exp.

Swapping Edelgard to Lances and Authority since she doesn't need any more Reason exp.

Bernadetta will pick up the last few points of Heavy Armor with her Group Task, so I had her working on Authority instead.

We're out of seals, so I go pick up some more. Again, Intermediates are limited until someone hits level 20, so I buy some for a stockpile. The stockpile should be big enough at this point, though, so I won't be buying more until we run out, now.

These are basically 500g stat boosters, and it's great.

She doesn't actually class change into Monk, obviously.

It'll be a while yet before we get magic weapons, but it a lot easier to get E+ Reason/Faith for 8 Magic via Monk than trying to get D+ for Priest/Mage for 10 Mag at level 10.

(Although Mage, admittedly, does let you get Fiendish Blow if you like using magic weapons for offensive purposes.)

Linhardt, on the other hand, does actually class change to Monk. (It doesn't give him any base stats, obviously.)

 

Exploration:

Chapter 3 is a short month, so we'll only have 3 exploration sessions. (If I knew for a fact that the Death Knight had 17 AS I would've spent all 3 cooking the Speed Food, but I didn't---I knew it was a possibility, but I had certain options for fixing a 1 Speed deficit.)

This is me Save Reloading for Nordsalat Seeds. You can't reload into Stat Boosters, as I've mentioned before, but each seed gives a 5% extra chance of a stat booster, so it's worth reloading for Seeds when you garden.

I won't bore you with gardening details, but tl;dr is that 1x, 4x, and 5x Nordsalat seeds is more or less optimal. I usually plant 1x until I have a ton, then I plant 4x or 5x, depending on how many slots I have.

Bonemeal is pretty expensive, but I'm quite content to pay 500g for an extra 6% chance or so at a stat booster. (Which should tell you that I value Speed at more than 8.3k a point, at least on certain units.)

Last time I'm cooking for a month, since now that tournaments are open it costs 150 Professor Points to cook.

Sharing meals cost 100 Professor Points, but tutoring students is worth the price.

This is Sylvain and Lysithea. Like I've mentioned before, if you manage to nab mages while they're still Monk they'll have at least D rank in Reason and Faith, so I'm trying to nab Lysithea and Annette early.

Ashe will join the team pretty naturally since I'll be cooking with him all the time.

My spare activity points go to tournaments since Professor levels are still a large and looming issue.

Everyone likes Owl Feathers. I'm not sure how much Support Points an Owl Feather gives compared to sharing a meal, so it's possible this is inefficient compared to just sharing a meal with Edelgard and hand Lysithea some feathers.

 

Lecture:

We only have 2 D Authority battalions at the moment, but once Edelgard and Byleth hits C Authority they can pass off their Battalions to someone else.

If I'd been spamming Choir it's quite possible Byleth would be C Authority right now, making tutoring Authority even more efficient, but this isn't bad.

I missed the screenshot, but Linhardt gets Wrath Strike from D swords.

Doop.

It was between Petra and Caspar for the last session of the day, and Caspar's rightful place is the bench. Ironically, being benched is better for exp gain than being the lowest priority team member, since we'll unlock adjuncts (strictly speaking, adjunct) before the map.

This is basically 50 Professor Points, seeing how it saves half a meal by refilling motivation.

Ditto. B-rank support is the highest you can reach before Part-2/New Game+.

Hubert will probably have to self study for the last 20 points to D Heavy Armor, although I don't know what Group Task I'll be assigning next. (Nor to whom.)

This is very occasionally useful. (Note that Rally Dex is +8 Dex.) But it's very much an early game thing, just like Seal Speed---which I've never gotten around to getting.

*shrug*

To be fair, Bernadetta is pretty great at swinging an Axe around, but bows are pretty much all she needs right now. (A devil weapon would be nice, but those are way later.)

I really should get Hubert D Authority, hopefully I don't forget next month.

 

Exploration:

Since food buffs stack, it means short months are naturally harder than long months. (Note that you don't get food buffs for the final battle of Part 1 or Part 2, so there's no need to hoard stuff like Goddess Fish to stupid extents.)

I save/reloaded for this. Nordsalat seeds are pretty likely as long as you only see 1 or 2 of the grain stalks in the predicted yield, so it's not much of a hassle to save/reload for it. (It very rarely takes more than 1 reload, if any, for me to get seeds.)

Nordsalat doesn't drop Nordsalat seeds if you have 3 grain stalks in the predicted yield, so make sure you have seeds leftover before going for the 4x or 5x seed pattern.

 

Lost Items:

We're on the last week of the month so I start handing out lost items for some motivation/support point boosts.

Alois.

Catherine.

Lost items are 50 motivation, so optimal play would involve holding on to them occasionally. But optimal is quite often annoying as hell. (Hubert, obviously.)

Marianne.

Ferdinand. (From his quest you'd know this belongs to either Lorenz or Ferdinand, which is pretty nice.)

Lorenz.

Caspar. Caspar gets 2 lost items really early, which is nice if you care about him. I'd take getting an extra point of Str or Speed in his bases over the 2 lost items anyway, though.

This belongs to Hilda, but you can't give it to her yet. I should probably report this as a bug, but I'm too much of a lazy bastard.

I believe you do get to give it to her later in the route, but before Part 2. I seem to have vague memories of giving her the perfume bottle.

Paying 100 Professor Points for some Authority exp. And Annette Support points. Next month will be the last month Annette and Lysithea are Monks, I believe, so I'll want to recruit them if possible then.

(They'll join too late for me to cram Axes and Heavy Armor into them, unfortunately.)

I don't know if I have tutoring sessions before free time next month, and I don't care, so all my free activity points goes into Tournament grinding.

Doop.

 

I kind of want to hold off recruiting Lorenz until later, but he needs Reason skill ranks to recruit, so I'll just accept him whenever he offers to join. (He won't offer right now, obviously, but support B doesn't take too long, especially if I start using Choir more.)

Claude's tea party, I get 'Nice' which is just Support Points.

 

Cleaning out some minor odds and ends for petty cash.

Nordsalat does produce 100g drops, but if you cared about value for your greenhouse stuff you're probably better off planting flowers. (Since they produce gifts.)

 

Map:

Spoiler

Suggest Level: 7, hey, I have some of those units. (Like, 3---Annette doesn't really count)

Pre-Map Planning:

Very generous time limit, even if you end up having to go around to avoid the Death Knight's 'Horrible Death Radius'™.

Mages actually do damage now, and watch out for Seal Strength, it could put you in double range if you aren't careful about combat math. They're also fairly accurate. (they have 126 hit in melee range, effectively, thanks to Heartseeker.)

For various reasons they're not really a threat, though.

Yeah... enemy scaling is really weird in this game, picking up a Steel Bow made archers less threatening, not more.

Some healer mooks straight up don't have attacks.

Always nice when the map has all the Chest Keys you need, I'm pretty forgetful, so occasionally I'm forced to reset just to buy keys.

Note that not all healers lack attacks, although if you're dying to 13 magic damage with 8 AS I don't know what to say.

18 Atk, which is nice, sure, but 9 AS is a gigantic downgrade considering we've been fighting 14 AS sword mooks for ages. Their Charm isn't completely garbage so their Gambits are fairly accurate.

Some mage mooks have magical gambits, so be careful about combat math---their gambits could do just that extra tidbit of damage needed to KO, compared to attacking regularly. 20 Atk, 13 AS naturally is also fairly threatening, but our team has Annette and Byleth on it, so yeah.

Why did our enemies get slower compared to the last few maps? Hits fairly hard, and, again, fairly accurate gambit. (Battalion stats aren't complete jokes anymore too.)

Hits like a truck, has the gigantic 2 radius AoE gambit (not shown), but base level Petra can double him. (In exchange for being OHKOd on his phase, probably.)

The official 'boss' of this map, kill him and you win.

I looked up a video as reference for this guy's stats, but the guy was on a lower difficulty. On maddening the Death Knight has 17 AS, so you need 14 AS to avoid the double. (Which is more or less guaranteed to kill someone unless you somehow manage to get someone into Armor Knight or Brawler for the anti-Double Adjunct.)

Don't know why he has Heartseeker in the personal skill slot rather than the Commander 75% gambit damage reduction and immunity to a whole bunch of stuff.

Also, note the 7 movement, he has a horrible death radius of 8. (1 Atk range + Movement)

 

The 'proper' no RNG way to kill this guy is to use the fact that enemy units have what I call 'cascading aggro' in this game, in that if an aggro'd unit winds up next to non-aggro'd units, the non aggro'd units will aggro as well. This means you can aggro the Death Knight to charge towards you without having to tank a round of his amazingly lethal attacks.

The trick is to split your team into two halves, one a skeleton crew, and one designed to brutally murder him once he gets into range. The death squad needs to have a member with toilet paper bulk so that when you aggro one of the mooks on the other side, they'll walk towards the death squad rather than the closer skeleton crew. Once they walk near the Death Knight he'll aggro and run towards the guy with toilet paper bulk as well, setting you up for a player phase KO.

The downside with that plan? The KO on this guy is annoying as hell already, and missing out on the 8 or so damage you'd get from hitting him on enemy phase would mean your team needs to be min-maxed like crazy on top of missing 1 or 2 units (since the skeleton crew would be on the other side). But, again, there is an RNG proof way to kill him, it's just bloody annoying to actually do it.

 

This guy can be fought really early in the map, so I don't mind just straight up resetting until he doesn't instantly crit-kill my designated tank.

A slight problem with our designated tank.

Of course, it would be way too easy if this actually worked. (On top of the 5% extra Speed growth compared to the other level 5 classes, Myrmidon also has 1 more base Speed.) The test failed, so I had to use the backup plan to the backup plan, which involves RNG.

I was comfortable with risking the Death Knight having 17 AS because I knew I could get an extra point of speed from either Myrmidon (which didn't work out), or... a level up. At the end of the last map Edelgard was one kill away from the next level, so I knew I could just reset for a Speed level.

Anyway, I started shuffling some skills around. Byleth picked up Faith before Lance Prowess, so here's me fixing her skillset. (The fact that Brawling Prowess wasn't the first skill cut is actually a minor miracle.)

Hubert still has enough skill slots, but I cleaned it up a little anyway. (Axe Prowess will go later, but right now it's not technically impossible for him to want to swing an Axe, just exceedingly unlikely.)

Bernadetta won't be swinging an axe until we find a Devil Axe somewhere.

Petra will probably drop Sword Prowess someday, but not right now.

Rally Dexerity is very much an early game skill, but it's useful for now.

Caspar is irrelevant, but I cleaned up his skillset a bit anyway.

Interestingly, assistant units don't get food buffs. Not a real problem since 9 speed is enough to avoid all but one double, and Annette shouldn't be taking combats anyway.

Byleth is once again loaded to the gills with a fairly random set of weapons.

Picked up a training sword for Edelgard since everything other than a training sword or a gauntlet would be too heavy, and using fist weapons is still pretty much a joke. The bow is just in case the bow mook at the start of map decides to 2 range her. (He doesn't.)

In retrospect, I should've handed the Steel Lance to Sylvain. (I gave Petra the Steel Bow we got from a quest, which I had forgotten about.)

Ferdinand's perfectly fine with just some lances. Once he gets Seal Speed I'll pick up a bow for him, for debuffing purposes.

Sylvain's Training Lance is running low on uses, so I buy another one for him.

Caspar is on Adjunct duty, and his speed needs fixing more than anything else, so I let him start grinding Sword exp.

Training Bow for Accuracy, Steel Bow for damage.

Occasionally story maps will ask if you wanted to replenish battalions before you start the map, but I don't know what triggers it.

 

Start:

Nice that they tell you again there's a time limit.

I want to start fighting the Death Knight ASAP, so Edelgard starts making a wall so I can advance the backliners. (Note the bow so that she can counter if the archer decides to 2-range.)

Pictured in red is the 'Horrible Death Radius'™

Also note Bernadetta off to the side to get some chip damage in and trigger her personal.

Doop.

Enemy Phase combat.

Edelgard is pretty unlucky, so the Church Soldier has some serious crit rate on her when her Prowess isn't active. Also note how he didn't decide to tank a counter. I think it's based on whether the counter would do a certain amount of damage.

Steel weapons aren't very good if you don't trade swap out of them for Enemy Phase, good sir.

Standing next to Byleth for the extra exp.

Got Speed, meaning we can tank the Death Knight now. It's a great level for other stuff, too, although Dex isn't too useful seeing how Thief would give her 11, assuming I remember to tutor her a bit in Swords.

Moral Reset Counter: 2

This is a moral reset because I'd need to reset for speed, technically it's worth 1.5 since Edelgard only has 40% Speed growths right now, but eh. Unlike getting crit to death, you can't just Divine Pulse away bad stat growths, you have to restart the whole map for it, so this is definitely a moral reset.

Doop.

Poke.

And dead. Bernadetta's only doing 13 with a Steel Bow right now because she's still Seal Strength'd.

This was... a bad level. It's basically Charm only once you consider Armor Knight's 30 base hp.

Everyone edges closer to the horrible death radius.

Topping off.

Rally Dex for accuracy. (Also a bit of crit, but the Death Knight has enough crit avoid that she needs to use Smash to see positive crit.)

Each point of Dex is 1% accuracy and .5% crit, I believe, for physical weapons. And I think it's just .5% accuracy for magical attacks.

Training Sword has a weight of 4, so Edelgard is still in doubled to death range.

But a Rally Strength fixes that.

Double checking that Edelgard isn't being doubled.

Holding Mire for support purposes. (It doesn't matter for enemy phase, but it'll matter for player phase, next turn, and I'd rather not forget about it.) Long range spells are really useful for providing support bonuses on player phase.

Here goes nothing.

Yeah...

Remember how combat uses the same series of numbers for the whole map? This means that not only do we need to Divine Pulse, but we'd also need to use up either more numbers or less numbers than last time, or Edelgard will just get exploded again.

Divine Pulse: 3

So I have Sylvain get an extra poke in.

Which saves 3 Steel Bow uses. (Since I had to Curve Shot with a Steel Bow last time.)

Here's the level again, as you can see Divine Pulse does jack all for level up numbers. (Those numbers are separate from the combat numbers, and are set at the start of map, as far as I know.)

Deja vu

Rallies and topping off and getting into position, again.

Same for the Mire thing.

Here goes nothing, take two.

Better.

tl;dr is that Edelgard ends up missing some damage to KO the Death Knight, meaning I had to roll the 9% crit.

(My lineup is very unoptimized, my mages only have E or E+ Authority, so no magical gambits, and my sole ranged gambit is on Edelgard.)

Divine Pulse: 4

Using Byleth instead is a little better (especially since I could get some extra chip in via Edelgard's gambit), but still not good enough.

Divine Pulse: 5

I'm obviously not actually bothering to do the combat math, and just tossing random gambits out, but I start with Byleth's 4 damage. (Note that gambits are pretty accurate since we actually have some support levels between our house members.)

Pity the 75% gambit damage reduction takes place after personal skills that boost damage, otherwise things like Officer Duty or Persecution Complex would trivialize this.

The only really shaky gambit of the lot, although it turns out I had 3 more damage than necessary, so it wouldn't have mattered if this missed.

Buffing Sylvain to increase accuracy + give me a little more chance to get some bonus damage from his Crest.

My choices for the finisher were Eldegard, Sylvain, or Ferdinand + someone else. Ferdinand occasionally prevents counters with his Crest, and Sylvain and Edelgard occasionally boost damage. Our Dex is too low for crests to be reliable (and I'm assuming it's based on Dex, I don't actually know), so I'd rather use Ferdinand to Rally than to attack, and Edelgard has our only ranged Gambit, so it was up to Sylvain.

Unfortunately, Petra has the Steel Lance, so I need to get it from her somehow.

Passing it to Byleth so Sylvain can grab it after one more pass. (I still need to pass the Lance to the square below Byleth.)

Here I mess up, forgetting to take the lance from Byleth before using a Gambit. Note how all my gambits except Petra's had been 100%, killing this guy doesn't need RNG at all as long as you can get him in position and have a min-maxed team. (Our team isn't min-maxed, we'd need the 2 magic gambits from the D-ranked battalions if we're missing Edelgard's 8 enemy phase damage.) It's just that getting him in position without requiring RNG needs a stupid amount of AI manipulation.

Well, first things first, lets buff our finisher.

Fortunately we had 2 unit-turns free, so we could still get the Steel Lance to Edelgard.

It's always nice when being stupid doesn't cost you anything.

Doop.

Can you believe I actually forgot Sylvain had this? Because I did.

Sylvain has 16 Strength right now, and probably like 3 Atk or so from his battalion, and a Steel lance + 5 MT gambit is 14 Atk, and 2 Atk from his Personal, so 35 Atk before effective damage bonus, and the Death Knight has 18 Prt, meaning 35 - 18 = 17 damage before effective damage. This more or less confirms Effective Combat arts are 2x damage from weapon MT---I could swear I also read it somewhere in Serenes Forest, but it's nice to have confirmation.

Like I've said before, though, Silver Weapon and whatnot's higher MT means effective damage Combat Arts will usually out damage regular effective weapons anyway.

To be fair, I didn't expect Sylvain to be this good either. (I benched him the last time I played---I knew his numbers were great just looking at him, but there's lot of great* units out there.)

*As long as you don't compare them to Byleth, anyway.

Sylvain didn't even get a full level out of the kill, which was disappointing, but whatever.

This is vendor trash. (The Dark Magic line involves 4 movement units trying to get into close combat and also somehow actually caring about sustain---as if mages aren't instantly obliterated by anything remotely threatening.)

Heartseeker is a great skill, but 4 movement ranged units aren't where you're supposed to put it.

The regular mage line is also stellar this game, insofar as 4 movement units can be stellar, so there's no reason to care about the Dark Magic line. (You also need 2 Dark Seals to get Dark Bishop, and there's only 3 in the whole game, as far as I know.)

Turn 4, no Divine Pulses left, time to stop playing fast and loose.

The enemy phase has the boss mook being remarkably polite about telling us about reinforcements. (This will be the only time the game will be polite about reinforcements, ever, I believe.)

We are on a time crunch, so let's hustle.

Curved Shot, amazing, etc. etc.

Remember that Byleth has the 5 Res Battalion, she has 16 Res right now.

Yoink.

This ends about as well as expected for the healer.

Edelgard wasn't holding a Vulnerary, so she steals one from Ferdinand.

-100g

Don't want to accidentally get someone killed from a double now that we can't just Divine Pulse the problem away.

Going through the middle means the group stays clumped up so you can correct for misses easier, but it doesn't actually speed things up by too much.

You'd still have to take the same amount of combats either way, after all, if you're trying to grab maximum exp.

Enemy Phase combat. (These mooks are so lucky Byleth is Speed screwed.)

Doop.

Byleth being lucky means she can pick up random weapons and use them without worrying about crits.

Start of Player Phase.

Dorothea has 6 spells total right now, which is unfortunate, since having 6 spells also means it's harder to get to level 5 for Monk.

Patching up.

Enemies have gotten slower while we ate twice as many Speed fish as usual, with expected results.

Caspar gets great levels like this (yes, I'm calling a two stat level great) fairly often, since he actually has 45% Strength and Speed growths, but his bases are awful enough that I rarely give him the chance to climb out of his starting hellhole. (This level is from adjunct exp, in case you've forgotten.)

I sure hope Petra gets a ton of damage from level ups, because she'll need em.

*shrug*

At least there's no reason to go Monk for the 4 base Res, now.

Zelda item music

I'm using combat arts quite often now just to get 100% hit rates, since no Divine Pulse and all.

The best part about lances is everything. (Except durability.)

Doop.

Basically a Charm only level. (Which is nice, since it's Hubert, and getting Thief is great for him to fix Dex and Speed at once, but he does need his Magic.)

Note to Self: Start Hubert on Swords.

Patching up. (So nice to have more than 1 healer.)

-100g

Byleth is scary enough (or Ferdinand weak enough), that the enemy mook would rather fight Ferdinand than get some free damage on Byleth.

This map'll take most of the 25 turns, although we could just Stride and kill the boss in like 1 or 2 more turns if we wanted to.

Enemy Phase combat.

Ditto.

I checked Ferdinand would survive the double before moving him up here. (Also enemy phase.)

Start of turn 7 gives us these mooks. They all have Battalions and hit hard and reasonably fast. Note that enemy phase reinforcements are very much the rule in Three Houses rather than the exception, so it's nice that these are player phase.

The side mages are faster, but slightly weaker.

They all have these battalions, so be careful about getting dinged for more damage than expected from a gambit.

The enemy reinforcements didn't move yet, so we have some time to finish up the mooks up here.

Evade tile is annoying, but worst comes to worst we have a fair amount of magic damage to ignore it.

Doop.

Petra does okay damage with Steel Bow, at least, even if using one defeats the whole point of a fast unit, this early.

Bernadetta takes her Training Bow back.

Doop.

This level can probably be described as everything that she doesn't actually need. Her stats are quickly approaching her averages again, despite the stellar first few levels.

Patching up.

E+ Authority. Healers have a easy time raising skill exp in maps.

More patching up.

We'll want to take care of the reinforcements behind us before moving forward again, so we'll sit tight rather than pull more mooks.

Using Stride now is slightly risky because I won't have it to fix a major fuck up later, but the highest chance of said major fuck up is dealing with the 3 mages anyway.

It takes a completely busted unit to make Gauntlets look something in the neighborhood of decent.

Note that I'm not hitting the weakened mook, I'm just adding supports for gambit accuracy right now.

Same here.

Gambits get major accuracy boosts from supports (and support ranks), so have people with long range is very nice for using them.

Weird level, pretty much only the HP and Charm are useful for nice, although the Mag will be useful later once we pick up some magic weapons, maybe. (Edelgard will always hit extremely hard with physical weapons, though, so it'll be pretty unlikely that she holds one. Magic weapons are mostly for people with shaky damage on either side.)

We don't really need Dex since it doesn't take much effort to grab Thief for her.

Being an Adjunct has to feel pretty great, since you get exp for doing nothing.

Lances.jpg

Hopefully Sylvain gets 11 Dex and Speed before level 10, since I don't really want to detour for Thief for him, but right now I'm quite happy with his stats.

Trade shenanigans meant Hubert had 2 Vulneraries and Ferdiand none, so he learns about State Enforced Sharing.

(Some might call it Communism.)

-100g (Also, it's kind of stupid that it's safer to get into combat with level 1 units now than, say, 2 chapters ago.)

Being a rally bot isn't glamorous, but it's very, very useful.

Annette had something like a 97% chance to kill this guy, but she'd also die on EP if she fails, so I didn't go for it.

Doop.

Enemies seem to prefer to save gambits unless they'll have to eat a huge damage counter otherwise. (Or if they see a kill.)

Enemy Phase combat. Note how the damage is a complete joke, and it's not even a double.

Ferdinand is, again, level 1.

Curved Shot wins at everything forever, again.

Doop.

Combat Arts (and Mire defense debuff) are pretty great.

I'd be happier with Speed as well, but honestly Strength is the most important thing for low leveled units. (That aren't mages.) Damage is what's needed to contribute.

I'm not sure if healing Byleth double dips on the support gain from exp and natural healing support gain, but it feels like the support gain from exp doesn't count for much anyway.

Everyone else is busy, so I have Linhardt bait a mook.

Also, healing.

I should probably remove physical weapons from my mages' inventories, hopefully I remember next map.

There's only one wave of reinforcements, so we can just march forward at our leisure now.

Enemy Phase combat.

Ditto.

Got to love House Leader tier offenses.

Curved Shot, etc. etc.

Doop.

E+ Swords for Caspar.

Petra gives Byleth her Training Bow, since I want Byleth on mage pulling duty.

The evade tile does nothing again magic, of course, but it's still the best spot, positioning-wise.

Annette being quietly amazing as always.

Patching up.

Not all that much faster than just splitting into halves and marching forward, but it is more resilient to bad RNG.

Being Speed screwed is such a feelsbadman. (Enemy Phase combat.)

Skill exp is pretty much Byleth's only weakness, due to the fact that wasting activity points this early on Faculty Training will hurt everything else too much. (I have a feeling the reason the only reason Faculty Training doesn't give Professor Points is that Byleth will be even more overpowered than she already is---she wouldn't be much different from New Game+ Byleth, probably.)

Hence, you know, her stabbing people with a lance.

You're lucky your bases are absurd, because these were some awful growths.

Bernadetta on mage killing duty.

Me checking damage in case, somehow, this noodle arms healer can actually kill Bernadetta.

Trade swapping to Training Bow, since it's a mage this side.

Annette doing Annette things.

Having Monk spell slots is so great. (So will having more than one Physic healer, pity Annette gets Mend.)

Using Swords because I want Edelgard to get Thief, I believe.

Getting Closer. Also note how Sylvain and Petra are slowly marching towards the right Chest. (Petra has the Key)

Edelgard probably smacks this guy too much for him to want to fight, so he does this. (The two roll system means anything below 20% hit might as well be 0, pretty much, and you have plenty of Divine Pulses on both maps to fix the exceptions.)

At some point you have to wonder if it's worth attacking at all. (Unlike Conquest mooks, Three Houses mooks are perfectly happy to suicide despite doing 0 damage or having 0% hit rates, they'll probably fix that again for the difficulty above Maddening, assuming we get one.)

Better. (Still enemy phase combats, of course.)

I like starting with Banshee since it means you don't really need to kill the guy anymore as long as it lands. (At least for the early game, later on people get enough movement that you need stuff like Encloser.)

Patching up.

This isn't 100% accurate without Ferdinand being full hp (for his Personal), I actually forgot about it until after I healed him. The healing was mostly to check if he can survive the double from full hp or not.

And here's the other Key.

Doop. (Bow Exp is actually surprisingly relevant for Byleth, since due to skill exp issues Thief and Assassin are two of her best cost/benefit classes---they're not on raw perfomance of other classes, but she picks up them naturally and they have good growths to boot, even if they're not as mobile as I'd like.)

This isn't as useless as it looks, I swear.

100% is the number of the day.

Doop.

It's amazing how useful these levels would've been 5 maps ago, pity his bases means I never bring him to those.

I patch Bernadetta to just 1 off full hp, forgetting that Dorothea would top her off. Oh well.

You can probably consider any map 'solved' well before you outnumber the enemies, but yeah, we outnumber them now.

Annette things.

The healer doesn't have a weapon, so this pack of 3 is really a pack of 2, just watch out for gambits.

Sylvain isn't in range, by the way. He's here to escort Petra just in case the right pack get some ideas about aggroing towards her instead of the team. (I suspect that AI movement is based on damage and turns to reach just like in Heroes, but I've never tested it. Like I've said before, testing AI in a game without combat saves is annoying as hell.)

More patching up. (Mostly for exp.)

These sure are some awful levels. Although HP will start mattering once he breaks 30, and Luck is great for magic users. (Luck adds accuracy and crit chance for attacking with magic, I believe, at half a percent per point, and it also increases magical avoid by half a percent per point.)

Doop.

This hits, incidentally, meaning Byleth is stuck for the turn. Pity this isn't Heroes where you can just end the turn and have debuffs fall off. (Letting you get danced and act debuff free.)

1k gold. (Well, 700, counting the cost of the Key.)

If you had to choose then go left, it has Spirit Dust instead. You know, I've said my pile of Intermediate Seals are enough (I have almost 10 now), but I think I'm going to buy more anyway. They're basically 1k gold stat boosters.

The gambit is the one that knocks people back, so I have Byleth shoot him.

In retrospect I should've used Mire first, but eh.

D Authority. Hubert tends to have better things to do than Rallying people to hit harder with magic. (Like, say, hitting people hard with magic.)

If you really need to OHKO something I guess it's useful, but we already have Annette for Rally Strength, and for various reason Strength tends to do more damage this early. (Mages will catch up once they start picking up Fiendish Blow, but for now House Leader bases are House Leader bases.)

Just think, if this guy had a Breaker I'd probably be seeing 90% odds instead. (Breakers are such a god damn joke in this game.)

Eh, he got a point of Strength and point of Speed in 2 levels, I'll take it.

Patching up.

It says a lot about how broken AoE rallies were that single target ones are perfectly usable, I think.

Edelgard on pulling duties. This early Tea Parties didn't have a real chance to kick in yet (unless you want to dumpster your Professor level), so Edelgard is still the best choice for avoiding enemy Gambits.

Almost.

Yeah, 20%, that'll hit people in a two roll system.

It says a lot about how scary Byleth is that people don't bother trying to hit her for free.

Curved Shot, etc. etc.

And Tempest Lance too.

And a great level to cap off getting level 10. I still want to try getting her C or D+ Swords to pick up Thief, though. It's only 1 Dex, but Edelgard tends to have quite a bit of spare skill exp, so picking up that 1 Dex won't cost too much beyond the 1,000g.

Hubert picks up the Chest Key since he's walking slightly ahead of Ferdinand now.

Doop.

I have no idea who thought an 8 MT Combat Art at D-rank was a good idea.

2 points of Strength and Speed in three levels, pretty great. Last run Ferdinand got Strength screwed in the mid game, but hopefully he'll have a job other than Lorenz's Adjunct bot this time.

Trade Swapping out of Steel Bow since that's not something you want to hold on Enemy Phase.

Sending Linhardt out to try and bait out the boss's Gambit use.

I event had Byleth walk into AoE for it to encourage the boss to use it.

Like I said, though, the AI prediction thing lies occasionally.

Pretty close now.

Enemy Phase combat, note how this very much is not a Gambit. But oh well.

It might not be the best idea to trigger Bernadetta's personal, sir.

Free exp is free exp.

I mean, maybe I simply didn't have enough people in range last time, so I sit Annette up here as well.

Don't get used to the doubles, for now.

Weapons in peoples' inventories between Part 1 and Part 2 get fully repaired, I believe, just something to keep in mind.

She missed, by the way. 21% misses rarely happen, but if you need a move to hit I suggest you have a Divine Pulse ready.

I didn't need Thunder to hit, obviously.

Bernadetta's personal means she can get by without a single point of Strength until level 20---by which time she'll pick up 17 Strength from most classes, or effectively 22 after her Personal. If you're completely insane you can get Warrior for 19, but that needs A axes and she has a Weakness. Wyvern Rider only needs B, and gets 18 Strength, but even that's still too much for a detour for my taste.

Just grab Authority instead for a higher MT Battalion, honestly.

Of course, 'getting by' means she'll be 2nd stringer level, rather than 1st string, so I'd prefer that she either get more Strength than that or pick up a ton of Speed.

Byleth standing by for mop up.

Poke.

Great level. She'll need a bit more Strength yet, but this is a good start.

Doop.

Bloody lying AI prediction.

Slow and Steady does something or another.

The lies...

: (

Also enemy phase.

Ditto.

It's pretty important to keep track of weapon uses, since you'll keep swinging your broken ass weapon around even after it breaks. (If you run out of spell slots you'll swap to the first weapon in your inventory or one of your offensive spells if you don't have any weapons, although I'm not 100% sure on that since I'm not crazy enough to have my mages take tons of enemy phase combats.)

Poke.

Stab.

These will probably go on Byleth, after I remember stat boosters are things that exist. (All stat boosters will probably go on Byleth.)

Poke.

I get tired of trying to bait out the Gambit, so I just get ready for Byleth to have to face tank it instead.

Which would need me to clear the board so she doesn't get KOd by a second combat after eating a stupid amount of fire (or lightning, I don't actually remember which gambit it is).

Healing to full.

Only 1 mook who can attack left.

Annette things.

In retrospect I should've fought the healers first, since this has a .8% or so chance of instantly killing the mage.

Doop.

We know the mage will use the Gambit rather than suicide to Byleth, so no reason to kill the healers immediately.

Yeah, you get that extra 20% chance to kill a half hp mook. (If you can't kill a half hp mook you have offenses that can't be fixed by 20% crit...)

I don't take the kill with Sylvain since no way he gets to 10 this map and Petra's fairly close to 5. (Although she won't reach it.)

Topping off.

We have a handful of turns to spare, and I do like how the game yells at you once you get to less than 10 turns left.

Finally. (It hits.)

Doop.

Gambit accuracy is still a joke without supports nearby, this early.

(But it hits.)

Annette things.

I have Byleth wait just in case I get tempted to attack and somehow get doubled. (Not possible, since the guy has 6 AS, but still.)

Patching up.

One more turn.

Enemy Phase combat.

Annette things.

Bernadetta adding some chip damage.

Byleth too.

The Speed doesn't matter since Thief will get me to 11 anyway, and the rest are... disappointing. Getting Armor Knight would take way too many Faculty Training sessions, so I'll just deal with not being able to effectively buy a Draco Shield.

Oh well, at least level 10 classes will get her out of 4 movement hell.

Healing.

I know I said one more turn last turn, but the guide suicides on enemy phase, so yeah.

Byleth doubles on enemy phase because Seal Strength is just enough to prevent her double, I believe, and buffs on your characters are cleared at the start of enemy phase.

Free Motivation refill is nice, but I think next month is when you can get C-rank with Edelgard anyway, so the refill's wasted.

Don't need a Training Bow for 2 range counters if we have the Sword of the Creator in a pinch. Right now it has 7 MT, 9 Weight, so it's pretty awful, but Ruptured Heaven is a 1-2 range Combat Art with 7 base MT and more based on your magic, so it's occasionally useful.

Relics cost an arm and leg to repair, but I believe they'll repair for free between Part 1 and Part 2, and Sword of the Creator gets full durability once it upgrades, so as long as you're careful with uses the repair costs won't matter too much.

[DehNutCase]

Oops, the update above is Ch. 4, not chapter 3. (And I can't edit it either.)

[DehNutCase]

Ch. 5 (If you missed the Ch. 4 update, scroll up and you'll notice 2 chapter 3s. The later one is Chapter 4, not 3, I'm just bad at numbers):

Part 1:

 

Academy:

Spoiler

I remembered right about Edelgard's support timing. Pity, since this means her MVP motivation refill was wasted.

Manuela's birthday, Nice, and no Charm.

Hubert already had 75 Motivation, but 25 is better than nothing.

The funny thing about Caspar is that if enemy Speed at the start of the game got higher or lower, he'd be a lot better. If they get higher everyone would get doubled anyway, so his 6 base Speed doesn't hurt him as much, relatively speaking. If they get lower then he won't be doubled, which means he'd be fine to bring.

He's still more or less on permanent bench duty, though. (It'll be hard for my 3rd stringers to climb into the team, since fresh recruits tend to slot into the 2nd string pretty easily.)

We have a level 10 unit now, so the game mentions we can take Intermediate tests and also gives us a free seal. (I remembered wrong about the shops upgrading, though---I guess they only happen at level 20 and level 30.)

Running of team of mostly housemates ends up being something like 20% accuracy for everyone and 30 or 40% accuracy for gambits, which is a nice little bonus for sticking with your 'official' students.

Doop.

Note how Edelgard's total stats went from 89 to 97? Pegasus Knight (and flying classes in general) has a stupid amounts of stats.

All level 10 classes have 8 base Luck, which is great for Edelgard, since she's pretty unlucky. She'll still be seeing positive crit chance from certain mooks, but the typical mook will have 0% on her now, between her Luck and Prowess.

 

Since we have a Pegasus Knight now, I'll talk about the class a bit. In a nutshell? If Pegasus Knights had 1 more Move, they're an endgame class.

You get them at level 10.

I wouldn't be ecstatic about bringing them to an endgame map, since fighting at a movement disadvantage is pretty annoying, but I can handle endgame maps with a team full of Pegasus Knights and Cavaliers if I had to. (I just don't have to since Falcon Knights and Paladins are a thing.)

 

Anyway, all fliers have 10 avoid for free, and, past a certain point, a point of avoid is more valuable than a point of Speed. This is because of magic's different accuracy formula---unlike with physical units, each point of Speed only gives half a point of avoid versus magic, although in exchange each point of Luck also gives half a point of avoid. On top of that, Pegasus Knights have 3 Speed for their class 'bonus' stat, the highest out of all level 10 classes (on top of a bunch of other stuff), and are tied for the highest Speed growths of level 10 classes with Thief at 10%.

Like Cavaliers (which have 7 move, so 1 more than Pegasus Knights), they have Canto, which is probably a skill enemy mook nightmares are made out of. Archers have +1 Range, which is nice and all, but Canto functions similarly to + [move - enemy attack range] range if you're hit and running people to death. Canto + Reposition is also one of the few ways you can make a team with mages not move slow as molasses, since you can just repo them forward to keep up with the rest of the team.

And, because they're a level 10, they have skill requirements fitting for a level 10 class. C Lances and D Flying gets you into Pegasus Knight 100%. This means people who go Pegasus Knight have tons of skill exp free to pick up combat stats from class bases or Authority. (The class also fixes Byleth's only real problem, which is skill exp, since she has 20 levels of Pegasus Knight +1 Sword, +2 Lance, +2 Flying to get the skill exp needed for Falcon Knight.)

For some reason, Darting Blow is still 6 Attack Speed on offense, despite it being a game where 4 AS doubles people, and Pegasus Knights get it as their mastery skill. (Pegasus Knights also get Triangle Attack from mastery, but Triangle Attack is mostly a meme---6 movement isn't quite enough to trigger it reliably, and your team needs to be pretty heavily flier biased for it to be worth bringing over other combat arts, considering you only have 2 slots after Reposition.)

 

Archers have effective damage versus fliers, of course. Archers also never hit fliers, even if we ignore the fact that you can dismount. As long as your Pegasus Knight will deal significant damage on the counter (use a bow or a 1-2 range weapon), Archers will prefer to avoid the counter, meaning they take the huge -20% per tile accuracy penalty, and anything below 20% accuracy functions similarly to 0% in a game with a two-roll system and Divine Pulse. It's not quite as stupid as Radiant Dawn, where a Wyvern holding an Hand-Axe is basically a hard-counter to archers, but all you need to remember about archers and fliers is that enemy archers do jack all to player fliers.

Later in the game, Mages will be the only things with something resembling 'accuracy' against your flying units. Pegasus Knights (and Falcons) have Resistance as one of their perks.

Fliers can only have flying adjuncts and battalions. This pretty much matters not at all, since flying battalions tend to be the best battalions anyway. Early game you only get 1 flying battalion, but more will unlock once you get a unit to level 20 and Paralogues give a fair amount of high-tier flying battalions.

Byleth is pretty much the only person who cares about having battalions all the time anyway, since it's hard for her to get Authority exp without getting into fights with them. Everyone else can just get Authority exp from being tutored and self studying while waiting for battalions. (If Felix was female he'd be significantly better, since then his personal would be active from something like level 1 to level 15 rather than level 1 to level 5 or 6 ish, since he'd be waiting on grabbing a battalion as a Pegasus Knight anyway.)

Byleth had her Battalion stolen, but she has C Authority now so she'll just take the one Edelgard isn't using anymore.

0% to get into Pegasus Knight, feelsbadman. The class isn't important enough to lose Professor Points for yet, so we won't be rushing for it just yet.

A team with 50% Canto classes is significantly stronger than a team with just 1 or 2, but a team with 2 Canto classes and a team with 1 Canto class plays more or less the same, and both are significantly better than a team without any Canto classes.

A team with 100% Canto classes is completely crazy, and probably why mage Cavalry is locked behind A riding and level 30.

Byleth was majorly Speed screwed, so Thief gives her 11 Speed. (Thief also has +2 Speed as their class stat bonus, so Byleth hits like an amazingly fast truck now.)

Thief and Assassin are classes Byleth more or less gets for free, thanks to her Strength in Swords, so I'm usually fine with her ending up in those classes until she gets the skill exp for Pegasus Knight. Assassin, notably, has 6 movement and take minimal movement penalties from terrain, so they're as fast as foot locked units get.

Just getting Strength for weight reduction purposes. Dark magic is pretty damn heavy.

We don't change to Fighter, obviously, since I'm not insane.

I know I said I'll stop stockpiling these, but I say a lot of things.

500g for stat boosters is a steal, even for people I don't really care about.

By far the best fishing event, but we don't have the shop for bait yet, and getting Speed fish for food buffs tend to outweigh getting a bit of extra gold and professor points.

On the 24th we have Fish of Mystery for Goddess Fish, and we can, in fact, cook it into food (Nordsalat gives the other half of the recipie), but you need crazy luck and timing to fish those up this early. And it's not too much of an improvement over Speed fish anyway.

Edelgard doesn't need lances now that she's in Pegasus Knight, so I swap her to swords to pick up Thief's Dex.

Hubert doesn't need much Reason for the time being, since he has 3 spells, so I have him working on Axes and Authority.

It'll be a long while yet before Caspar is level 10, if ever, so I have him working on Authority and Lance rather than Axes, Heavy Armor, and whatnot.

Similar to Hubert, although Dorothea only has 2 spells, I have her working on Authority. (D-rank is needed for mage battalions, so that's the minimum she needs as an offensive spell caster.)

I might pick up Physic for her later, which she gets at C-rank faith. (Which is the last Faith spell she gets, after Heal and Nos.)

 

Exploration:

Doop.

Important non-quests:

Like last time, these are 300 Professor Points each.

+300 (I'm not 100% sure I'm getting all the books, I'm just showing the ones I've found.)

This is important, I swear. (Hubert totally knows what's up---he's talking about this month's story map.)

 

Quests:

The Statue Quest. Having the +1 Class Exp statue makes getting the level 5 class mastery skills a lot easier, at least for our 2nd stringers. (Edelgard and Byleth are already level 10, but at least it makes backtracking for Soldier skills easier.)

It's a pain in the ass to miss an exploration day for a combat map, but these Merchants are worth it. Buying gifts means you can trade money for Professor points, since you'd get to grind tournaments rather than share food for Support Points and Motivation, even if we ignore unlocking being able to buy forging stones.

Blacksmith quest, you can find the quest item before you get the quest, so don't be surprised if you can turn it in immediately. Smithing Stone are for regular stuff, Black Sand is buyable from the merchant that unlocks after we do the combat map, and you make Killer weapons with them.

Killer Weapons are pretty great, I'd say they're about 1 step down from 'true' endgame stuff like Braves, but you get them extremely early and you don't need to worry about them running out, seeing how you can just buy the materials. They aren't very durable, but you can think of them as having a 25% Crit Combat Art permanently active.

They need C-rank to wield, though, and most of our team aren't there yet.

A mission to talk to some people to find Jeralt. Duscur Bear is the +3 hp item, so even though it sells for a fair amount you should probably save them, since the only way to get Meat outside of quests is to do combat maps for them.

Nice flavor mission, although we don't really need the rewards too much.

We don't forge anything yet, that'll be for before the start of a map.

Tea leaves are pretty expensive to buy, too, so this quest gives a fair amount of cash and cash equivalents.

Statues unlocked, which is great.

Divine Pulses and regular exp are what I like to get if everything else is handled, but right now Lance exp and Flying exp are still iffy so I go for those. And Class Exp as well, since you don't spend a lot of time in level 5 classes.

The optimal thing to do is to save this quest, since it involves giving 'liked' gifts, but eh.

 

Non-quests:

I reset for the seeds. I don't really care too much about the quantity of seeds, even if they're like 5% of a Speed Carrot, so I only reset if I don't see any Nordsalat Seeds at all.

I was barely off from a Professor level increase, so I share a meal before finishing the Greenhouse. (If you're extreme attentive you'd notice I did this before finding the books.)

Turns out C+ doesn't unlock any new Cultivation methods, though. Getting C+ is still great for this month, since it'll let us do 2 combat maps rather than 1 in our day off. (You definitely do the merchant quest even if you're below C+, but the other combat quests can go hang---I rarely do them even when I have 3 combats per day off, since on Maddening the enemy levels are total jokes.)

-150 Professor Points to get +1 Speed for everyone, but a bit of extra Speed tend to make maps a lot smoother. (2 points of extra Speed and you're basically playing on a lower difficulty, but I rarely go that far.)

This is the recipe that uses Goddess Messenger, which is the fish you get from Fish of Mystery. (It also sells for 1.5k gold). Nordsalat occasionally gives Magdred Kirsch, so if you're farming Speed Carrots the other half of the recipe isn't a problem.

Personally I don't find this worth it, nor the crazy +1 all stat recipe you get at nearly maxed Professor Level, but it's there if you need it.

I want to recruit Annette this month (and Lysithea as well, but RNG didn't smile on me for her), so I do the choir for -100 Professor Points. (Or +200, depending on your point of view.)

We don't have the Faith needed to recruit her by asking, so we'll need to wait for her to ask us.

We'll be doing combat this month, meaning we'll skip a week of exploration, so I top off Motivation on my students.

The meal also get the two of them C-rank support.

Movation is more or less topped off, so I do a tournament. (I could've done another meal, but it wouldn't really have been worth it.)

Bringing a Pegasus Knight into a level 8 tournament goes about how you'd expect.

 

Lecture:

Sword to try and get Thief.

Doop. (D-rank)

It's more efficient to tutor Hubert in Authority and have him self-study swords, but it doesn't really matter.

Speed and Dex are both issues for him, so getting Thief at 10 will be quite useful.

Getting D rank for mage battalions.

This basically never matters. +8 Charm, I believe. Yeah, it's 40% avoid against enemy gambits, but the people that matter tend to have sky high Charm. (Hell, Pegasus Knight even has 10% growth for it.)

Tutoring for Lances, although thanks to the statues it's not too awful to tutor for axes anymore.

Enough to have a decent shot at Pegasus Knight now. (D+ Lances)

We don't really have a mage Battalion for him, and the healing Battalion is... not very useful, but it's not like Linhardt needs anything at the moment.

Doop.

Petra doesn't really need Flying exp, but not many people need movement type exp in general, so something would be wasted no matter what pair I pick.

I take Hubert off Authority for a week so he gets D Heavy Armor.

Doop.

I accept, naturally.

Doop.

This is C Authority, I believe.

Annette self studies for Reason and Authority, which is pretty much what she needs. (She picks up quite a few good Rallies from leveling up Authority.)

 

I forgot to take Screenshots of the weekly summary, unfortunately.

Hubert goes back to Authority now that Heavy Armor's D.

Annette has a Strength in Axes and is good at Weeding (the Armor Group Task), so it's trivial to pick up Armor Knight for her, although she probably won't get it before level 11.

Here's her stats at the moment. 

Compared to level 1 that's +3 Hp, +2 Str, +4 Mag, +4 Dex, +3 Speed, +3 Luck, +2 Def, +5 Res, and +3 Charm for 8 levels. Not great, but perfectly acceptable levels. And her Speed and Dex is high enough that I don't mind skipping Thief for her, even if it'll probably cost her 1 Speed.

Got to love 1k gold stat boosters.

Hubert goes Monk, naturally.

Maps:

Spoiler

 

Pre-map Planning:

Non-Paralogue non-story maps are complete jokes on Maddening, since the enemy levels are way too low for exp or difficulty. Even a team of level 1s shouldn't have much issues with the two quest maps I'll be doing.

Enemies barely even outnumber us.

And their stats are complete jokes, seeing how they're about 5 levels lower than the story map this chapter.

We've been dealing with 14 AS mooks basically since the start of the game, so 18 Atk 11 AS is a joke.

This map has an archer, and if you play extremely careless + are using level 1 units holding Steel weapons he might cost you a Divine Pulse.

16 Atk, 12 AS, mages are still a joke for now.

22 Atk, 9 AS, and this guy is the 'boss.'

Doop.

Magic Battalion for Hubert. These get 4 Magic Attack at max level, and that's pretty much all you'd care about from them.

Ditto for Dorothea. These only get 3 Magic Atk at max level, but in exchange they get a tiny bit of hit and an extra point of Resistance, relative to Empire Magic Corps, but mages tend to have toilet paper bulk no matter what you do, so you shouldn't care too much about their bulk.

We'll get getting jack all for exp, so I swap Byleth to Soldier to pick up the mastery skills.

Byleth goes to Adjunct for Edelgard for efficiency.

A little cash starved, so I sell a Bullion.

Edelgard is in a grounded class again, so I buy a C rank Battalion for her.

Empire Knights get 5 Phys Atk, 5 hit, 5 Prt, and 5 Charm at max level, as well as a huge AoE gambit, albeit one with only 1 use.

Knights of Seiros lose 1 Phys Atk, 5 hit, and 2 Prt in exchange for 3 Res, 5 avo, and a -1 to Magic Atk instead of -2 relative to Empire Knights, which is an okayish trade, but most physical units will prefer Empire Knights.

Annette picks up Holy Monks, since it's easy to remember when it's on her. A turn I need everyone contributing tends not to be a turn I want one person to do most of the work, so it pairs up nicely with her rally bot duties. About my only issue with Annette is that she doesn't pick up Physic, but other than that she's a top-tier support.

Linhardt picks a tanky Battalion for if I ever get lazy about his positioning.

Sylvain gets the Pegasus Knights for now.

It's easier for me to remember who has what gambit when the gambit's range matches their attack range, but it's probably better for melee units to get ranged gambits from a pure utility standpoint.

Bernadetta loses a point of Atk, but accuracy does matter for bows, so it's not too bad.

*shrug*

Upgrading a training weapon is just for weight reduction and durability increase. Well worth it, of course, but you can get by with normal training weapons without much issue. (The second picture is just to show you the stats of a normal training lance.)

I start removing melee Prowess skills from my mages.

Bernadetta loses Faith and Axes, since they're not really relevant.

Lances are good enough that you wouldn't mind a unit with an inventory of only lances.

Ditto.

I leave Annette's skillset as is, although she doesn't really need the Axe Prowess.

I leave Edelgard Wrath Strike, forgetting I'll want to replace it with Reposition. (It costs me a reset later, but oh well.)

Bernadetta probably doesn't need Tempest Lance, but eh.

Smash is pretty useless for a guy with only lances.

Ditto.

Don't really need to overthink this map, seeing how it's a face-roll.

 

The Map:

Rallying Hubert so he has enough AS to avoid the archer double.

And he moves on into threat range.

Everyone shuffles a bit forward, and Edelgard shuffles a lot forward to grab some class exp.

Doop.

Like I said, the enemies have total jokes for stats. (Enemy Phase combat.)

Enemy Phase still.

Ditto. This guy survives since he's faster and bulkier, which is a great combination to avoid dying.

Also enemy phase. Hubert dodges an arrow and then smacks the Bandit.

A light tap.

And some exp farming.

Luck and Magic are pretty much the only two stats a mage cares about before level 10, seeing how just about everything else will get fixed via class bases.

Doop.

Charm and Luck isn't exactly awful, since it makes Hubert more accurate, but Magic is where it's at.

Ferdinand moves in to pick up some exp.

Annette things.

Linhardt things.

Everyone shuffles closer to the boss.

Enemy Phase combat.

A regular attack would've murdered this mook (due to doubling), so I use Wrath Strike to reduce out going damage.

We don't really need gambits for much, so I have Hubert gambit this guy for a guaranteed kill.

Doop.

Poke.

Thoron has 5 MT on Thunder, hence why I'm using it to grab the kill. (Thunder is exactly 1 damage short.)

It's weird that Dorothea starts with 2 Thunder spells and then goes off to pick up Wind and Fire stuff later, but it doesn't really matter.

She doesn't get a level, but she does get a lot bulkier.

Doop.

Doop.

I don't move anyone into enemy phase range since 4 movement is awful.

On player phase I optimize a bit and have Edelgard stand in range to counter on enemy phase.

Doop.

Some great levels from Petra. Her Strength needs a lot of work to get her offenses going, but she's getting the kind of levels she needs right now.

Poke. (Bernadetta procs her Crest, so this mook goes to almost dead.)

And Dorothea turns him all dead.

Healing is more about getting exp than anything combat relevant this map, since incoming damage is really low.

Doop.

Great level, although Linhardt needs to hit all 3 Speed levels for the point of Speed to be relevant, and the Defense isn't relevant at all.

The mage is high-lighted since it's the only mook that might cause problems.

Enemy Phase.

D Lances, Tempest Lance means Byleth wouldn't really mind swapping to a entirely Lance inventory right now, although fist weapons are still unironically good for her, albeit at the cost of Lance exp. (Just about nobody else likes fist weapons, on account of either not having the damage or else because mounted classes can't use fist weapons.)

Doop.

Great level, and I'd be quite happy if Dorothea gets enough Dex and Speed that she doesn't need Thief.

This combat probably gets our healers more exp than Caspar gets from it, honestly.

Doop.

Hp +5 turns a lot of ORKOs into 2RKOs, so it's great.

Linhardt things.

Doop.

Short and easy map, which is nice. If Maddening was even harder then strolls like this would be nice to unwind after going all out, but this is my second time through the game so my team's a lot more optimized than before.

(Don't ask about trying to do Mutiny in the Mists with exactly 9 combat spell uses, I did it, mind, but it wasn't pretty.)

The enemies couldn't wait to die, so they moved closer to us on their phase. I move some people out of the way and have Annette top of Edelgard.

Iron Lance stops Edelgard from doubling people, which will let our 2nd stringers get exp.

Physic gives more exp than Heal, so I prioritize Physic in easy maps. (Support spell exp seems to be entirely based on the spell in question, so higher rank spell = more exp.)

Everyone clusters behind Edelgard for one last bit of exp farming.

Enemy Phase combat.

Which tops Byleth off for Soldier exp, which is great. Reposition is basically +2 movement in terms of team-wide mobility (it's better actually, since it's equivalent to +2 movement and a minor Canto effect), and +2 Def is great in general.

Also enemy phase.

Doop.

1k gold, obtained. (I like how it's weird for enemies to carry money, apparently, but carrying random stacks of gold is perfectly fine.)

Doop. (Mages tend to have wildly varying accuracy depending on how many of their supports of nearby, since they can't use a combat art to increase it, so having mages from the same house tends to improve their performance as a group.)

Wrath strike to control damage.

Some last bits of healing exp farming.

I like mobility a lot, but since I don't care about turn count (just how annoying doing something is---hence why I rarely dance abuse for levels), healers are basically walking fountains of gold (from saving healing item uses), and exp (from healing exp), meaning I don't mind bringing them into teams at all. Especially in this game, where you get Physic early and often.

Doop.

You get a bit of Renown for clearing Auxiliary maps, I believe, but I personally don't find them worth it unless you get something very special, since without the DLC harder difficulty maps they only give regular exp to your 2nd and 3rd stringers. Nice for bringing a straggler up to par, but not very useful for the team overall.

The special event maps tend to give you a ton of gold, if you're not into fishing or tournament grinding for it, though.

 

Map 2:

Decided to do the other quest map rather than one of the Auxiliaries, since it'll make my quest log a bit cleaner for the moment. (Eventually I'll just leave accepted combat quests incomplete because they're worthless, though.)

 

Pre-map Planning:

We're on the same map as last time, although this map has twice as many archers, so it's twice as hard as the last map. (0 * 2 = 0, by the way.)

12 AS, 15 Atk, really? We've been dealing with 16 Atk, 14 AS mooks since level 1.

The Archers on this map are also a bit faster than the one from the last map, but still jokes.

Seriously, what are these garbage stats.

The 'boss,' although you'd only know that because he's the only one carrying money.

Doop.

We swap Byleth to Thief since Soldier is mastered now.

We remove Brawling Prowess since Byleth doesn't really have issues with accuracy or getting her face blown off with a crit. (She'll still keep the gauntlets, she just doesn't need the Prowess for it.) Defense + 2 and Hp + 5 means she's quite tanky now.

Reposition, the best thing before and after sliced bread.

Edelgard is Adjuncting for Byleth this time, so our team will get a tad more exp thanks to her Personal. (It doesn't really matter now, though, since we have statue exp bonuses.)

Byleth didn't have a battalion last map, on account of Bernadetta taking it (since Adjunct don't get Authority exp anyway), so I grab a random one for her.

One quick check to see that she has weapons in her inventory and we're good to go.

 

The Map:

Annette things. The 1 extra AS from the archers means Hubert is going to get doubled fighting them no matter what, so there's no need to rally him.

Byleth goes way forward I want Edelgard to finish Soldier as well.

Swapping Bernadetta to Training Bow to avoid doubles.

And I move her into archer range to trigger her Personal.

We shuffle a bit forward and end the turn.

Enemy Phase combat. (Like I said, enemy stats for non-Paralogue, non-Story maps are a complete joke.)

Personally I like the stupid and suicidal AI of Maddening compared to Lunatic Conquest, but it really doesn't matter too much either way. It's pretty trivial to make it so that enemies will have like 1 damage or 5% chance to hit you if you wanted them to be able to, it's just... tedious. The game doesn't really get harder for it, just more annoying, like how you have to face-tank things without holding a weapon fairly weapon in early game Maddening.

(Still Enemy Phase)

The two roll system means that you gain/lose a lot of accuracy for deviating even a little bit from 50% hit, which is why enemy archers getting more range tends to make them, ironically, less threatening. Hence why enemy Bow Knights are jokes.

Doop.

Great levels, she's even on the road to get more than 11 Speed before level 10.

Poke.

The two archers on this map are the only threats, so I Stride to remove them as an issue.

It's kind of amazing how many little things combine to make Pegasus Knight completely stupid as a class. Lances are great, enemy bows are jokes, Canto is stupid, doubles happen at 4 AS difference, etc.

He's not wrong. I'll be picking Thief up for him, most likely, unless he gets Dex every single level from now on, but these are some great level 5 stats.

That sweet healer exp.

Doop.

We're dealing with the second archer now, so I Stride again.

Tempest lance just in case the person I send to kill this guy doesn't have a lot of Atk. If this was Conquest I would've doubled checked the plan for the next few moves beforehand, but Divine Pulse is an amazing quality of life bonus to make playing maps less tedious and more fun.

Pity the designers were like, hey, Divine Pulse makes the player stronger, so we better stuff a bunch of things like 2% crit rates on everyone and enemy phase reinforcements to make them use up their Divine Pulses. I'm not sure where they got the idea that that kind of thing is... fun?

Maddening is easy enough that I can ignore the annoyances, since they stop mattering past the early game, but I'm not sure that'll be true for the next difficulty, if they end up adding one.

Cheers.

Doop.

Poke.

Supports add a bit of damage (and a lot of accuracy) to Gambits, so it's a good idea to move other people before you use a Gambit if you have minor damage or medium accuracy issues. Major accuracy issues are unfixable, mostly, although I guess you can Rally Charm for it. Outside of a map you can also throw some tea parties, but it'll take a lot to fix a major accuracy issue.

Doop.

Sylvain avoids the double if I'm holding Training Lance+, but losing more hp means more healing exp.

Doop.

Linhardt things.

Archers are gone, so I'd be hard pressed to lose units even if I set the game to Auto-battle.

Poke.

D+ Swords, so Edelgard has a good shot at Thief, now.

Doop.

Poke.

Caspar... misses.

It was a long shot for Caspar anyway, though. 30% is probably more like 10% after two-roll is factored in.

Yes, Bernadetta loses 5 damage, but the healing exp.

Not much to say, just inching forward.

Enemy Phase combat.

Doop.

D+ Authority. I don't really care about Gambit damage since my team's fine on damage output, but more Authority = more stats since you get better Battalions, and that's always nice.

Doop.

Some great levels coming from our second stringers.

Stab.

C Authority, which unlocks some neat grounded Battalions. (We don't get C flying Battlions until level 20.)

A poke turns into a lethal hit, on account of Bernadetta's Crest.

Healing.

Healing.

More Mag would be nice, but Luck and Res are the other 2 stats he cares about anyway. (Str is also marginally relevant, since I don't want to use an Intermediate Seal just to get a healer a bit less of a weight penalty.)

Almost done.

Exp farming. (The enemy moved forward, so I position my mooks in response.)

I mean, might as well get him some combat exp.

3 range tome for support purposes.

Doop.

Enemy Phase combat.

Ditto.

Hopefully Sylvain gets 11 Speed by level 10, since getting Thief for him would be pretty annoying.

Doop.

*Shrug*

Poke.

Healing exp.

Regular exp.

Pretty good. I'll probably get him mage by level 5, even though he'll probably be benched, since 500g is cheap enough that I don't mind.

Loot.

This misses.

I'm low on unit-turns so I use a gambit to make the guy stand still.

Healing.

Next turn is just a formality.

Moving Byleth for her Personal.

Doop. (This wasn't 100% to begin with, I had Ferdinand Rally him for it.)

Easy pair of maps, which is nice, since doing multiple maps per chapter is going to be pretty tedious.