A tier list: feel free to argue

[LoneRecon400]

53 minutes ago, Cysx said:

A Manuela pairup was a bit of a stretch even back when we didn't know how Guard adjutants worked(and I meant, I used to bring those up a lot for Annette, so I'm not particularly happy about it). I'd say the same for the SCS, especially on a map where the beasts have dragon attribute.

Dorothea is only competitive because of rapier existing, in a chapter where most of the targets she'd struggle with are vulnerable to it. If we're looking for an actual differentiator, let's take Claude's paralogue. It's available form ch 17 onward, I'll assume level 34. With her 67 attack, she OHKO nothing. Not a single enemy on that map. Marianne cannot really deal with the warlocks, and of course doesn't OHKO the boss or the worms(still deals much higher damage), but she does the rest.

I'd rather push into swordfaire/lancefaire 2 to keep OHKOing in Shambala than go Meteor, and lose Stealth, though. The issue is that swordfaire 2 doesn't salvage Dorothea the way it does Marianne. And despite what we both said, that also allows the latter to deal with a bunch of targets in VW 22(archers/snipers of course but also grapplers, swordmasters, assassins and cavaly including Elites with Assal.

I still disagree with that conclusion. We don't have to keep going, though.

Why wouldn't she be allowed a Manuela Adjutant? Adjutants aren't so valuable that she can't be afforded to be given one, especially when Blessing exists for all your 1 HP needs. Sublime Creator breaking barriers is pretty unneeded since Byleth doesn't much damage with the barriers up and would prefer a Killer weapon for actually engaging one. A Curved Shot from a Blessed Bow would accomplish the same thing it's needed for without being retaliated against.

Paladins and Armored Units make up a good amount of the enemy composition on the majority of maps. To discount them among the enemies isn't really accurate representation. Besides, Dorothea would be able to ohko the Assassins and Snipers in Claude's Paralogue with a Maneula Adjutant. Side question: is Blutgang effective against Wyverns? Because I wouldn't think Marianne would have good hit rates against 88 Avoid enemies.    

S+ Faire skills take too much investment to reach without a substantial amount of Aux battles.  Like going from E -> A Rank requires 1320 Skill exp, while going to A -> S+ requires almost double that at 2280 Skill exp. Besides, providing +10 Hit to a good amount of units is probably just as valuable as a endgame combat unit with how dodgy some of the endgame enemies. And a lot of units require chip damage to finish off enemies which Dorothea would be decent at doing with Thoron.

I disagree with your conclusion but I wouldn't mind still going. Its always fun to argue about unit quality. 

Edited July 13, 2020 by LoneRecon400

[Cysx]

2 hours ago, LoneRecon400 said:

Why wouldn't she be allowed a Manuela Adjutant? Adjutants aren't so valuable that she can't be afforded to be given one, especially when Blessing exists for all your 1 HP needs. Sublime Creator breaking barriers is pretty unneeded since Byleth doesn't much damage with the barriers up and would prefer a Killer weapon for actually engaging one. A Curved Shot from a Blessed Bow would accomplish the same thing it's needed for without being retaliated against.

Paladins and Armored Units make up a good amount of the enemy composition on the majority of maps. To discount them among the enemies isn't really accurate representation. Besides, Dorothea would be able to ohko the Assassins and Snipers in Claude's Paralogue with a Maneula Adjutant. Side question: is Blutgang effective against Wyverns? Because I wouldn't think Marianne would have good hit rates against 88 Avoid enemies.    

S+ Faire skills take too much investment to reach without a substantial amount of Aux battles.  Like going from E -> A Rank requires 1320 Skill exp, while going to A -> S+ requires almost double that at 2280 Skill exp. Besides, providing +10 Hit to a good amount of units is probably just as valuable as a endgame combat unit with how dodgy some of the endgame enemies. And a lot of units require chip damage to finish off enemies which Dorothea would be decent at doing with Thoron.

I disagree with your conclusion but I wouldn't mind still going. Its always fun to argue about unit quality. 

I'd be inclined to disagree, they stop most units from being ORKOed in a very large amount of situations(and it can work well on top of blessing, can't it? Since if the double doesn't leave at 1 HP, the next assaillant will trigger Blessing and then be incapable of killing on the double as well). Then there is the issue that existed back then; you have three slots, and a bunch of + damage supports. Just in general it's hasty to just assume +damage supports on any given combat unit now.
Well, why would a killer weapon be better? Sublime heaven gives +20 crit and is ranged. I mean it's not necessarily a terrible idea to give it to Dorothea if it pushes her over the edge, but I disagree with the notion that Byleth doesn't use it and that it's thus a fair assumption that it's freely available.
Needing resources that she isn't guaranteed to get is a low point. There is an argument to be made that this goes for lance relics as well, but they're in relatively low demand since brave combat art users don't need them, neither do vengeance users.

True, there are a lot of them. But there are more things that aren't them(especially later on), and she's a lower movement unit that cannot be picky about her targets.
Side answer: You're leading me on and you have a point though those are 71 avoid units since magic avoid and most don't have battalions and yes its combat art is.

I can tell you from experience that this is incorrect. I avoid aux battles like the plague and most of my combat units reach S+ around ch19/20 on maddening(sometimes earlier, though that's rare; also no CF, clearly that's not happening there). If you're sufficiently focused and keep it going for the whole game, it's very doable. +10 hit(primarily on black eagles students unfortunately) is nice for sure, but with only light chip to provide outside of that, it's really not that remarkable. It's nice that she gets that at all, but again, I'd rather she'd keep killing things, as if I didn't value her ability to kill things, why would I even have gone for that build in the first place

I can relate, I disagree with my conclusions too sometimes. Not here though. Also okay fine geez . We might be running out of things to say though.

[LoneRecon400]

2 hours ago, Cysx said:

Guard Adjutants stop most units from being ORKOed in a very large amount of situations. Besides, you only have three slots so pretty it's hasty to just assume +damage supports on any given combat unit now.

Well, why would a killer weapon be better? Sublime heaven gives +20 crit and is ranged. I mean it's not necessarily a terrible idea to give it to Dorothea if it pushes her over the edge, but I disagree with the notion that Byleth doesn't use it and that it's thus a fair assumption that it's freely available.

Needing resources that she isn't guaranteed to get is a low point. There is an argument to be made that this goes for lance relics as well, but they're in relatively low demand since brave combat art users don't need them, neither do vengeance users.

+10 hit(primarily on black eagles students unfortunately) is nice for sure, but with only light chip to provide outside of that, it's really not that remarkable. It's nice that she gets that at all, but again, I'd rather she'd keep killing things, as if I didn't value her ability to kill things, why would I even have gone for that build in the first place

I can tell you from experience that this is incorrect. I avoid aux battles like the plague and most of my combat units reach S+ around ch19/20 on maddening(sometimes earlier, though that's rare; also no CF, clearly that's not happening there). If you're sufficiently focused and keep it going for the whole game, it's very doable.

Guard Adjutants only activate on the second hit of an attack. So units will have to take a hit first for it take activate, which isn't really happening with most mages units. I'd also hesitate to use Blessing on them when it's better suited for things like dodgetanks or units using Wrath.  But I'll concede that Dorothea shouldn't automatically assumed to have an adjuatant depending on the team comp.

Sublime Heaven only hits once and isn't enough to kill on most monsters in one hit when a lot of the late game monsters hit 199 HP. The fact that almost all of them have 0 Luck also makes having more Crits a lot more consistent than normal, so it's best for Grapplers and Warmasters to take them on instead.

How are Relic Lances in low demand? One rounding benchmarks become very strict as the game goes on. So if a Swift Strikes users wants to consistently Orko the bulkier enemies, such as Grapplers or Heroes, they'll often need to make use of them.

Dorothea kills enemies at a part of the game where other units have trouble doing so in one of the harder chapters of the game and only falls off at point where almost every unit fall off of. Nobody faults Catherine for being unable to oneround late game enemies, so I don't see why it should be held against her. Especially considering that her competition needs specific weapons that other units really want to make use of on top of requiring S+ Faire to accomplish what she can't.

The problem is that my experience doesn't mesh with yours. I've only gotten two units to S+ in all of my playthroughs, and one of those was Shamir. That's why I figure to fall back on numbers instead. Speaking of...  

There's 49 weeks of Training during the entirety of VW. If we assume that Marianne had a boon in Lances the entire time and studied it solely for +36 exp a week the entire game, that'd be 1,764 skill exp. Assuming that we start tutoring her in Lances after finishing Authority, Riding, and Reason by around Chapter 11, will give her 25 Weeks of training. We'll also assume that she gets two greats every week. Combined with the Indech +1 Instruction bonus will result in +34 Lance Exp a week. That gives a total of 2,614 Skill exp. So with all of that, she'd need to fight 98 battles as a Paladin to reach S+ even with all of those generous assumptions. 

Now if you throw in Sauna into that, it all becomes a mess and probably explains the disparity. I really dislike it for the amount of favoritism it brings, but if you use it I can't really fault you for that.

Edited July 13, 2020 by LoneRecon400

[Dark Holy Elf]

9 hours ago, LoneRecon400 said:

They have Canto and Stealth to avoid any enemies that may come their away, so low bulk isn't that much of an issue.

Being Rng screwed in any stat, especially attacking ones, doesn't really exist in this game due to the presence of Advanced class bases and so many ways to increase damage output. 

Assassin means that Dorothea can just equip a Magic Staff to make up for any class mods that lacks. Most mages don't want to give up Thryus or Cadueus Staff to make up for their lack of movement. And they can both make use of the Levin Sword + if they want ranged chip damage.

The durability is more a contrast with, say, your average paladin/wyvern/grappler, who can much more easily take hits if necessary. Admittedly physical characters don't have as much OHKO potential as magic combat arts pre-timeskip, but once you get brave weapons (as well as Fierce Iron Fist/Hunter's Volley and a few A-rank character-specific brave combat arts, which all show up around the same time give or take) the gap goes away and the physical characters just feel better at this niche.

Warlock's base is only 17 (no other advanced class has a magic base worth noting for these two). An average Dorothea at Level 20 has 19-20 magic depending on her exact number of gains as a Mage (Marianne about 2 points higher), so at best Warlock base can only patch her up to 2-3 points below her average at that level. It's also not trivial to certify for Warlock ASAP if the rest of your build isn't emphasizing Reason (it requires B+, easy for pure mage builds but less if you're trying to also get physical ranks high for a completely different set of advanced job requirements).

Dorothea can equip a Magic Staff as a mage too. Sure, she'll need to switch away from Caduceus/Thyrsus, but that's something you can do on the fly as needed. And Agnea's Arrow without a range-booster still has more range than Hexblade. The move is a fair point of course, and definitely a perk of the magic combat art builds generally, particularly if we're not considering DLC.

9 hours ago, Cysx said:

That's definitely arguable as well, yes. I really like it on Marianne still. It's very comparable to Vengeance Bernadetta for most of the game, even though the damage isn't quite as high and she needs a relic to deal with bosses even early on(also no Pass). Dorothea, well I've said my piece, I can agree that she's better off doing something else.

That's fair. I fully admit this comes down to valuing different things in units; I have a higher opinion of mage Marianne/Dorothea than I do Vengeance Bernadetta as well (but again, they're so hard to compare that it's subjective).

 

EDIT: I missed there was a new page. The only thing I want to add is that I'm definitely with LoneRecon on S+ not being a thing; in seven playthroughs I've never reached it on anyone, even though I usually do as many paralogues as possible (not aux fights though). I once did a VW playthrough where I left Claude on bows as one of his goals (as well as sole equipped weapon type) the entire game and sent him exclusively through bow classes and he still didn't even get that close to S+. Could I have gotten there with even more instruct (though I definitely did some!), mono-weapon focus, and/or monopolizing a Knowledge Gem? Probably. But even if you do it'll be a very small window with it, and I'd generally suggest we ignore it for these discussions.

Edited July 13, 2020 by Dark Holy Elf

[Cysx]

8 hours ago, LoneRecon400 said:

Guard Adjutants only activate on the second hit of an attack. So units will have to take a hit first for it take activate, which isn't really happening with most mages units. I'd also hesitate to use Blessing on them when it's better suited for things like dodgetanks or units using Wrath.  But I'll concede that Dorothea shouldn't automatically assumed to have an adjuatant depending on the team comp.

Sublime Heaven only hits once and isn't enough to kill on most monsters in one hit when a lot of the late game monsters hit 199 HP. The fact that almost all of them have 0 Luck also makes having more Crits a lot more consistent than normal, so it's best for Grapplers and Warmasters to take them on instead.

How are Relic Lances in low demand? One rounding benchmarks become very strict as the game goes on. So if a Swift Strikes users wants to consistently Orko the bulkier enemies, such as Grapplers or Heroes, they'll often need to make use of them.

Dorothea kills enemies at a part of the game where other units have trouble doing so in one of the harder chapters of the game and only falls off at point where almost every unit fall off of. Nobody faults Catherine for being unable to oneround late game enemies, so I don't see why it should be held against her. Especially considering that her competition needs specific weapons that other units really want to make use of on top of requiring S+ Faire to accomplish what she can't.

The problem is that my experience doesn't mesh with yours. I've only gotten two units to S+ in all of my playthroughs, and one of those was Shamir. That's why I figure to fall back on numbers instead. Speaking of...  

There's 49 weeks of Training during the entirety of VW. If we assume that Marianne had a boon in Lances the entire time and studied it solely for +36 exp a week the entire game, that'd be 1,764 skill exp. Assuming that we start tutoring her in Lances after finishing Authority, Riding, and Reason by around Chapter 11, will give her 25 Weeks of training. We'll also assume that she gets two greats every week. Combined with the Indech +1 Instruction bonus will result in +34 Lance Exp a week. That gives a total of 2,614 Skill exp. So with all of that, she'd need to fight 98 battles as a Paladin to reach S+ even with all of those generous assumptions. 

Now if you throw in Sauna into that, it all becomes a mess and probably explains the disparity. I really dislike it for the amount of favoritism it brings, but if you use it I can't really fault you for that.

I mean, neither build we're talking about gets OHKOed by stuff typically, right? Plus mages can avoid damage fairly easily, guard adjutants are for melee.

Yeah but if Sublime heaven crits, it can be expected to OHKO(the first couple lifebars at least, it's +25 mt), while a killer would vary wildly. It doesn't rival knuckles of course, but it's a decent option to have if Byleth is going to fight, and it's still a strong ranged weapon regardless of that. I don't know, I don't hear of many people giving it to someone else.

Well not really, they ORKO for the whole game with silver+. But I'm assuming lancefaire 2 lategame which apparently is contentious, so I guess we have to deal with that first. Worth noting is that they  don't get to abuse magic combat art accuracy, so the lance of ruin can easily give them lower than ideal accuracy scores unless you picked up hit +20.

I don't think there's much of a point making this a Dorothea vs the world thing, this would greatly overcomplicate things. I'm not necessarily saying she belongs that low on a tier list, just a good deal lower than Marianne. Don't misconstrue my words, though; Marianne still performs better than Dorothea without faire 2, and honestly we had already established that.

I don't know what to tell you, I used to assume that was impossible too, and then I just started doing it and it happened for my whole crew consistently. I genuinely don't think I did anything special either, and I didn't have the dlc/sauna. I just tutored every single time.

Dang, do we have to do that? Tutoring exp is tricky business. Okay.

------

I don't have the training weeks noted down, but I've got 48 tutoring ones for VW written down, with the second earliest one not being counted because you don't get to recharge motivation, so, 47, which roughly matches I guess?

... sooo looking at what you posted, you're assuming no tutoring before ch 11 even though she needs to unlock Paladin and you're going for solo tutoring even though that's a waste in a context where you want exp for multiple things for a while, which, yes, helps with numbers but may also be the reason why you think any of this is generous.
Most importantly, you're assuming zilch perfects, when they result in 3x to 4x exp once a session, and 2x every other time. I've done some very uninteresting but pretty thorough testing a while back to figure out the rate( I have the result of around 1000 sessions noted down with various factors, such as with talent, with bane, neutral, with/out professor guidance, with/out a +1 statue bonus, any and all combination of all of them... I did stop before getting sufficient sampling for statue 2 and combinations including that, but everything was consistent so the idea that these would affect the rates when nothing else did didn't seem to hold much water) , and extracted a pretty clear 40% good, 40% great, 20% perfect. The variation on perfects pushes this into math that is a bit advanced for me to write down a solid formula off of, but one would turn a 34 session into a 54 to 64 one, so if I'm anywhere near correct and one can expect that to happen roughly 2/3 weeks... it's pretty easy to see that your numbers are an underestimation.
It is also possible to have professor guidance available for a while if you play your cards right, and the lance +2 statue bonus is reasonably obtainable some time into the timeskip. Also ~100 rounds of combat in an entire maddening playthrough... that's not really that crazy to be honest. At least not to me. To be fair I rarely boss skip, which might be a big differentiator here.

Okay, so say her objective is S+ lances, D+ reason, B authority and I'm pretty sure I pulled off +1 move and lancefaire 2 but let's go with the minimum of C riding to savescum for Paladin.
From her base, that is a collective 3900 with talent and 860 without. Reason must preferably be done by ch 6, riding by chapter 11, and authority asap.

Reason gets 20 a week as a dual focus, aka 9 weeks to get to 180. That's roughly the very end of month 4, and no tutoring involved.
Riding gets 24 a week and needs 300. However, neutral vs talent as a focus is a 20% difference, as opposed to up to 50% for tutoring... thus considering authority is neutral, riding is best tutored. Fortunately the riding +2 statue bonus is easy to get in time, and professor guidance can be a part of it throughout if you're going for Mov+1 on Byleth. Let's assume you're not, though, so she gets a base 8 exp when tutoring. Getting a perfect will result in a 48 to 80 gain, but 5 perfects are not an average outcome by any means, so let's say the average is 60. Getting no perfect will result in 32 to 48, averaged at 40. If the 2/3 rate for a perfect is applied, this is 160 per three weeks aka ~53 a week. So, this takes 6 weeks of tutoring away from lances.
Authority requires 680 and gets 20 a week as a dual focus. 34 weeks to get there is clearly not acceptable. Authority is constantly raised through combat which can reasonably lower that number to 30(40 rounds of combat can generally have happened by the time you can be expected to reach B), but that's still much too high. So let's mix in some tutoring.
Authority is one of Byleth's specialties and also something they want to raise, which means the prof.guidance bonus can be expected all the way up to C+, if not more. Authority +1 can also be assumed relatively early; to simplify, we'll say prof guidance until C+, and Authority +1 all the way. So, that's 7 a week until C+, which taking the above ratio is ~46 a week, then 5, which is ~32 a week. I'd say that 8 tutoring sessions is a decent expectation here, which should take care of about half of the whole thing, leaving ~15 weeks of dual focus when combat is taken into account.

Which leaves us with lances why am I inflicting this upon myself again? 14 weeks of tutoring were lost, leaving us with 33 in the entirety of VW. 24 weeks were spent as a dual focus and the remaining 25 can be solo. That's 1476 wexp. 33 tutoring at a rate vaying between 6 and 9 or 10; post timeskip(aka when the +2 statue bonus is the most likely to be on) being really heavy on tutoring, I'll average at 8. Using our lovely ratio, we get the same as riding, aka ~53 a week, which is 1749 wexp, so a total of 3225 wexp. This is 375 missing exp. At +6 per combat as a Paladin and +3 as the rest which we'll average at 4.5, that's 83 rounds of combat. From the few screenshots I have left of this playthrough, my Byleth fought 376 times, my Marianne 256 times, and my Leonie 384 times. These definitely were above average in my army and potentially are high in general, but case in point, 83 isn't unreasonable, and there's enough leeway to get it one or two chapters before 22.

 

... well that is a thing I just did. Man.

----------------

7 hours ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

The only thing I want to add is that I'm definitely with LoneRecon on S+ not being a thing; in seven playthroughs I've never reached it on anyone, even though I usually do as many paralogues as possible (not aux fights though). I once did a VW playthrough where I left Claude on bows as one of his goals (as well as sole equipped weapon type) the entire game and sent him exclusively through bow classes and he still didn't even get that close to S+. Could I have gotten there with even more instruct (though I definitely did some!), mono-weapon focus, and/or monopolizing a Knowledge Gem? Probably. But even if you do it'll be a very small window with it, and I'd generally suggest we ignore it for these discussions.

I was gonna be like "I don't know what to say man, I ain't lying". But then I went and wrote the above for some reason. As a result, I will now say

You will ignore it over my sleep-deprived body
... It's cool actually. But I'm genuinely surprised it worked for me and not others. None of the above qualifies as special to me. That's assuming I made no big mistake of course, but the fact is that it happened for most of my active cast, on two separate playthroughs...

Edited July 14, 2020 by Cysx

[LoneRecon400]

2 hours ago, Cysx said:

Dang, do we have to do that? Tutoring exp is tricky business. Okay.

-----

I don't have the training weeks noted down, but I've got 48 tutoring ones for VW written down, with the second earliest one not being counted because you don't get to recharge motivation, so, 47, which roughly matches I guess?

... sooo looking at what you posted, you're assuming no tutoring before ch 11 even though she needs to unlock Paladin and you're going for solo tutoring even though that's a waste in a context where you want exp for multiple things for a while, which, yes, helps with numbers but may also be the reason why you think any of this is generous.
Most importantly, you're assuming zilch perfects, when they result in 3x to 4x exp once a session, and 2x every other time. I've done some very uninteresting but pretty thorough testing a while back to figure out the rate( I have the result of around 1000 sessions noted down with various factors, such as with talent, with bane, neutral, with/out professor guidance, with/out a +1 statue bonus, any and all combination of all of them... I did stop before getting sufficient sampling for statue 2 and combinations including that, but everything was consistent so the idea that these would affect the rates when nothing else did didn't seem to hold much water) , and extracted a pretty clear 40% good, 40% great, 20% perfect. The variation on perfects pushes this into math that is a bit advanced for me to write down a solid formula off of, but one would turn a 34 session into a 54 to 64 one, so if I'm anywhere near correct and one can expect that to happen roughly 2/3 weeks... it's pretty easy to see that your numbers are an underestimation.
It is also possible to have professor guidance available for a while if you play your cards right, and the lance +2 statue bonus is reasonably obtainable some time into the timeskip. Also ~100 rounds of combat in an entire maddening playthrough... that's not really that crazy to be honest. At least not to me. To be fair I rarely boss skip, which might be a big differentiator here.

Okay, so say her objective is S+ lances, D+ reason, B authority and I'm pretty sure I pulled off +1 move and lancefaire 2 but let's go with the minimum of C riding to savescum for Paladin.
From her base, that is a collective 3900 with talent and 860 without. Reason must preferably be done by ch 6, riding by chapter 11, and authority asap.

Reason gets 20 a week as a dual focus, aka 9 weeks to get to 180. That's roughly the very end of month 4, and no tutoring involved.
Riding gets 24 a week and needs 300. However, neutral vs talent as a focus is a 20% difference, as opposed to up to 50% for tutoring... thus considering authority is neutral, riding is best tutored. Fortunately the riding +2 statue bonus is easy to get in time, and professor guidance can be a part of it throughout if you're going for Mov+1 on Byleth. Let's assume you're not, though, so she gets a base 8 exp when tutoring. Getting a perfect will result in a 48 to 80 gain, but 5 perfects are not an average outcome by any means, so let's say the average is 60. Getting no perfect will result in 32 to 48, averaged at 40. If the 2/3 rate for a perfect is applied, this is 160 per three weeks aka ~53 a week. So, this takes 6 weeks of tutoring away from lances.
Authority requires 680 and gets 20 a week as a dual focus. 34 weeks to get there is clearly not acceptable. Authority is constantly raised through combat which can reasonably lower that number to 30(40 rounds of combat can generally have happened by the time you can be expected to reach B), but that's still much too high. So let's mix in some tutoring.
Authority is one of Byleth's specialties and also something they want to raise, which means the prof.guidance bonus can be expected all the way up to C+, if not more. Authority +1 can also be assumed relatively early; to simplify, we'll say prof guidance until C+, and Authority +1 all the way. So, that's 7 a week until C+, which taking the above ratio is ~46 a week, then 5, which is ~32 a week. I'd say that 8 tutoring sessions is a decent expectation here, which should take care of about half of the whole thing, leaving ~15 weeks of dual focus when combat is taken into account.

Which leaves us with lances why am I inflicting this upon myself again? 14 weeks of tutoring were lost, leaving us with 33 in the entirety of VW. 24 weeks were spent as a dual focus and the remaining 25 can be solo. That's 1476 wexp. 33 tutoring at a rate vaying between 6 and 9 or 10; post timeskip(aka when the +2 statue bonus is the most likely to be on) being really heavy on tutoring, I'll average at 8. Using our lovely ratio, we get the same as riding, aka ~53 a week, which is 1749 wexp, so a total of 3225 wexp. This is 375 missing exp. At +6 per combat as a Paladin and +3 as the rest which we'll average at 4.5, that's 83 rounds of combat. From the few screenshots I have left of this playthrough, my Byleth fought 376 times, my Marianne 256 times, and my Leonie 384 times. These definitely were above average in my army and potentially are high in general, but case in point, 83 isn't unreasonable, and there's enough leeway to get it one or two chapters before 22.

 

... well that is a thing I just did. Man.

----------------

I was gonna be like "I don't know what to say man, I ain't lying". But then I went and wrote the above for some reason. As a result, I will now say

You will ignore it over my sleep-deprived body
... It's cool actually. But I'm genuinely surprised it worked for me and not others. None of the above qualifies as special to me. That's assuming I made no big mistake of course, but the fact is that it happened for most of my active cast, on two separate playthroughs...

You really have my respect for trying to math this all out. Tutoring exp is such a painful thing to calculate just due to the sheer amount of variance it has.  I'd thought mono focus and two greats would be enough replicate the rate of Perfects, but it looks like not. I'll most certainly keep in mind what you said on the rate of Prefects in any future discussions.

I will say that to be more accurate you should inculde things like Stable Duty and Gambit Authority Exp. Getting a prefect at Stable Duty with a boon will result in 18 Riding Exp, which really adds up over time. Using gambits also doubles the rate of Authority gain even if you miss, so something like 10 Gambits will result in 40 Authority Exp. 

I will say through, that the difference in the amount of battles we have is truly staggering. Like when I tried out this setup, my Marianne only had 80 battles under her belt and less than 4 of my units engaged in more than a 100 battles. Granted, I typically go for the bosses and skipped a lot of the Paralogue while also having Marianne as an Adjutant when she was Mage, but still. 

Either way, I'll concede that Marianne is a tier above Dorothea primarily due to being able to access unique Lances to be able to secure some OHKOs Dorothea cannot. It's been a very fun time debating with you and I wish discussions like these happened more.

Edited July 14, 2020 by LoneRecon400

[Cysx]

17 hours ago, LoneRecon400 said:

You really have my respect for trying to math this all out. Tutoring exp is such a painful thing to calculate just due to the sheer amount of variance it has.  I'd thought mono focus and two greats would be enough replicate the rate of Perfects, but it looks like not. I'll most certainly keep in mind what you said on the rate of Prefects in any future discussions.

I will say that to be more accurate you should inculde things like Stable Duty and Gambit Authority Exp. Getting a prefect at Stable Duty with a boon will result in 18 Riding Exp, which really adds up over time. Using gambits also doubles the rate of Authority gain even if you miss, so something like 10 Gambits will result in 40 Authority Exp. 

I will say through, that the difference in the amount of battles we have is truly staggering. Like when I tried out this setup, my Marianne only had 80 battles under her belt and less than 4 of my units engaged in more than a 100 battles. Granted, I typically go for the bosses and skipped a lot of the Paralogue while also having Marianne as an Adjutant when she was Mage, but still. 

Either way, I'll concede that Marianne is a tier above Dorothea primarily due to being able to access unique Lances to be able to secure some OHKOs Dorothea cannot. It's been a very fun time debating with you and I wish discussions like these happened more.

Appreciate it! Doing anything like this always seemed like a fool's errand when it came to discussing this game. And that hasn't really changed, considering the time it takes to plan it all out. Kinda hope the devs go for something less gratuitously random next time around. Less tedious too.

Yeah, both of those completely slipped my mind. It's true that the stables in particular make riding a bit of a non-issue, but then again, maybe it'd be unfair to assume Marianne gets one of the two slots for an extended period of time.

That is actually crazy. I went for almost all paralogues and am a "rout as fast as possible" kind of guy, so it checks out to an extent, but still... Now I'm wondering what the actual average of the whole playerbase looks like.
It's so tough to level the playing field with this game already because of aux battles and gardening, too... but then again, if my experience with this community is anything to go by, your numbers are more relevant than mine, so I guess that's my lesson here. I honestly wouldn't have guessed it was this big a difference before this exchange.
@Dark Holy Elf, just for the sake of it, may I ask what your own numbers look like?

Well, clearly neither of us were playing to win anymore, but I have a feeling you've been doing this long enough that you know how rare your gesture is on the ol' internets; that's how it's been for me anyway, thus I genuinely appreciate this as well, regardless:) And likewise!

[Dark Holy Elf]

@Cysx Sadly I don't have my battle numbers written down, just kills. Battles of course tend to be higher, though how much depends on the unit type in question. For mages trying to use magical combat arts, a huge number of their battles are probably kills. Checking a few playthroughs my units who focused on magical CAs usually ended up between 80 and 100 kills. Draw your own conclusions there I suppose.

Definitely cool to see the numbers! I think I can explain the difference in our experiences though: at least personally, I never tutor any one unit every single week. There are 3-7 spots open for tutoring every week depending on point of the game (on average biasing towards the top of that, of course), and I'm using ~10 characters in addition to Byleth (most post-TS maps have 11 unit slots), so some taking turns is to be expected. I've generally assumed each character gets 2/3 of the available tutoring slots and that works out for me for back of the envelope calculations, and if we do this here then any given character only gets around 32 tutoring opportunities instead of 47, and missing out on those 15 sessions is 795 less lance exp if I'm reading your numbers correctly, which obviously is enough to make S+ basically impossible. You can focus on fewer characters if you want and I respect that as valid but eh, lowmanning breaks FE and is boring. You can ignore e.g. your dancer if you want though tbh I kinda like getting the dancer Move+1 (and/or higher sword rank if I'm doing a dodgetank dancer build).

[Cysx]

1 hour ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

@Cysx Sadly I don't have my battle numbers written down, just kills. Battles of course tend to be higher, though how much depends on the unit type in question. For mages trying to use magical combat arts, a huge number of their battles are probably kills. Checking a few playthroughs my units who focused on magical CAs usually ended up between 80 and 100 kills. Draw your own conclusions there I suppose.

Thank you; at least we have our explanation. Plus this game begs to be warpskipped. I don't do it because I don't enjoy it, but yeah.

1 hour ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

Definitely cool to see the numbers! I think I can explain the difference in our experiences though: at least personally, I never tutor any one unit every single week. There are 3-7 spots open for tutoring every week depending on point of the game (on average biasing towards the top of that, of course), and I'm using ~10 characters in addition to Byleth (most post-TS maps have 11 unit slots), so some taking turns is to be expected. I've generally assumed each character gets 2/3 of the available tutoring slots and that works out for me for back of the envelope calculations, and if we do this here then any given character only gets around 32 tutoring opportunities instead of 47, and missing out on those 15 sessions is 795 less lance exp if I'm reading your numbers correctly, which obviously is enough to make S+ basically impossible. You can focus on fewer characters if you want and I respect that as valid but eh, lowmanning breaks FE and is boring. You can ignore e.g. your dancer if you want though tbh I kinda like getting the dancer Move+1 (and/or higher sword rank if I'm doing a dodgetank dancer build).

Well truth be told I don't really lowman(precisely for the reason you brought up) or ignore anyone, though there tend to be two to three characters for which I go with mid to low investment builds(healers typically, but not always). And then Byleth plays by different rules so that leaves me with 6 to 7 units I can consistently invest in for most of the game(I tend to rush A+ prof rank asap). Looking at it now, in the playthrough I've been mentioning, Lorenz, Marianne, Leonie, Lysithea and Ignatz got to their respective faire 2, and Claude fell ~200 wexp short(he has A+ authority and riding, so it was doable but I clearly spread myself too thin). My Hilda had mov +1 and Bolting, so she was the seventh despite being my dancer. But that only happened once maddening was released, before that, just looking at the exp requirements made me give up on S+ every time, and I genuinely thought it was nearly impossible until I almost accidentally did it. Thought it was some kind of "Maddening magic" for a while, which I guess it kinda is, since you fight more. Especially me apparently.

Edited July 14, 2020 by Cysx