Silver Snow Tier list

[drattakbowser]

Let's do a Tier list for a Silver Snow (Church route) , you choose what character you make in the list. Anna and Ashen Wolf do not count on the list.

High Tier :

Medium Tier :

Low Tier : 

No 4 tier or more !!

Each tier LIMITED 12 characters !

Edited July 25, 2020 by drattakbowser

[drattakbowser]

For me :

- High Tier : Byleth, Seteth, Catherine, Shamir, Ferdinand, Bernadetta, Petra, Felix, Mercedes, Ingrid, Lysithea and Leonie.

- Medium Tier : Flayn, Linhardt, Caspar, Dorothea, Sylvain, Annette, Marianne and Hilda.

- Low Tier : Hanneman, Manuela, Alois, Cyril, Ashe, Lorenz, Raphael and Ignatz.

Edited July 25, 2020 by drattakbowser

[Bartozio]

High tier: Byleth, Bernadetta, Shamir, Felix, Ferdinand, Leonie, Sylvain, Linhardt, Lysithea

Mid tier: Seteth, Petra, Dorothea, Marianne, Flayn, Mercedes, Alois, Catherine, Ignatz, Annette, Cyril

Low tier: Caspar, Raphael, Ingrid, Hanneman, Lorenz, Manuela, Ashe, Hilda

Some comments about the big differences:

Seteth and Catherine: My main issue with them is that they join pretty late, and they still need some tutoring to get to the level of the units you've been using. They can become really great later on, especially Seteth, they'll be good for shorter than units like Bernie and Sylvain, which I feel makes them deserve a lower tier.

Linhardt: getting physic in chapter 2 is really sweet to give Byleth a bit more flexibility, and healing and warping is just really nice overall.

Sylvain: He has a similar passive as Leoni that makes him a decent tank and damage dealer early on, and later on swift Strikes is just amazing.

Ingrid: Not really sure what people see in her tbh. Her bases aren't great, she doesn't get any great combat arts unique to her, and I don't think she serves any other particular niche?

Hilda: Joins late with bad weapon ranks, and honestly doesn't have many things going for her anyway beyond giving people a bit more damage (at a point where most of your units will be one rounding). I'd rate her higher in GD and BL, but here she's pretty bad.

[lenticular]

42 minutes ago, Bartozio said:

Ingrid: Not really sure what people see in her tbh. Her bases aren't great, she doesn't get any great combat arts unique to her, and I don't think she serves any other particular niche?

For me, it depends on difficulty level, with Ingrid having a huge drop off from hard to maddening. Her two greatest assets are her speed and her versatility. 60% speed growth is good enough that she will routinely be doubling pretty much everything on hard (or normal). In terms of versatility, she's easy to build into pretty much any class you want, except for the male-only ones. She has no skill weaknesses, is moderately ok in both strength and magic, has a decent enough spell list (notably thoron and physic), and decent enough combat arts. Basically, she's a good all-rounder with her one exceptional feature being her speed. I find her a really fun unit to use in hard. Put her into maddening, and it's a different story, though. Maddening emphasises specialists over generalists, and also really devalues speed, by making it impossible to keep up with the enemy stat scaling.

For the wider topic, I rank Cyril incredibly low in SS because of his late joining. Since you only get him in chapter 12, he's much harder to train up, he's left with commoner growths up until you do get him, and you don't even get the benefit of his super early PBV. He's really hard to justify using for any reason beyond "I like him" or "I felt like it".

[Dark Holy Elf]

I definitely disagree. Ingrid can absolutely still double things in Maddening. With Darting Blow (and optional Speed+2 and/or Weight-3) she can get her player phase speed close to 50 by endgame without any stat boosters, which is enough to double all but the fastest enemies e.g. assassins and falconknights (who are relatively squishy and thus easily killable by brave weapons and brave combat arts). If you do farm speed boosters she can double even more. And even if you don't, her good speed lets her double/quad a variety of midrange speed enemies like paladins, most magic units, warriors, bow users, etc., which many other units will struggle to double.

I also find Ingrid's Alert Stance+ dodgetank build much more useful in Maddening (it's overkill in Hard), and due to her strength in flying she gets there before most other people (Petra is the other main candidate). The other characters with strength in flying are either significantly slower, inclined more towards magic, and/or join late and thus behind on flying exp.

She has some flaws like mediocre bases (although on SS you largely bypass those, enemy pegknight growths helps her a bunch) and weak str growth but she's still a good unit.

[Zapp Branniglenn]

What are the rules for the tier list? Is it NG or NG+, DLC or no DLC? Do we care about keeping low turn counts and/or not grinding? Are we grading primarily on combat prowess or are other factors considered? And why limit to three tiers of 12 characters each? I agree with the statement that units in this game are close enough together in viability that you could do a three tier tier list, but suggesting that as many as 11 character are around as bad as Cyril in his worst route? Please.

Edited July 26, 2020 by Glennstavos

[drattakbowser]

2 hours ago, Glennstavos said:

What are the rules for the tier list? Is it NG or NG+, DLC or no DLC? Do we care about keeping low turn counts and/or not grinding? Are we grading primarily on combat prowess or are other factors considered? And why limit to three tiers of 12 characters each? I agree with the statement that units in this game are close enough together in viability that you could do a three tier tier list, but suggesting that as many as 11 character are around as bad as Cyril in his worst route? Please.

NG or NG+ it's equal, No paid DLC i told you no Anna and Ashen Wolves. Count and grinding no care. Factors. Because if we do 4 tier or more it's very too much and the team have 12 unit to deployed maximum in the last map ! What 11 character are bad ? Cyril I know he weak because joining late his flying is E, if you recruit him earlier in Blue Lions and Golden Deer you can quickly increase flying.

[Barren]

8 hours ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

I definitely disagree. Ingrid can absolutely still double things in Maddening. With Darting Blow (and optional Speed+2 and/or Weight-3) she can get her player phase speed close to 50 by endgame without any stat boosters, which is enough to double all but the fastest enemies e.g. assassins and falconknights (who are relatively squishy and thus easily killable by brave weapons and brave combat arts). If you do farm speed boosters she can double even more. And even if you don't, her good speed lets her double/quad a variety of midrange speed enemies like paladins, most magic units, warriors, bow users, etc., which many other units will struggle to double.

I also find Ingrid's Alert Stance+ dodgetank build much more useful in Maddening (it's overkill in Hard), and due to her strength in flying she gets there before most other people (Petra is the other main candidate). The other characters with strength in flying are either significantly slower, inclined more towards magic, and/or join late and thus behind on flying exp.

She has some flaws like mediocre bases (although on SS you largely bypass those, enemy pegknight growths helps her a bunch) and weak str growth but she's still a good unit.

I can totally agree with that. Giving her swordbreaker against assassins and swordmasters allows her to handle them with relative ease when she goes Falcon Knight. I do like Darting Blow and Speed +2 on her because it's a way easier transition for her to go Myrmidon then Pegasus Knight. Giving her strength stat buffs like Rocky Burdock helps her out a lot when not going down the Brigand class line. I can see her go Myrmidon, Pegasus Knight, Swordmaster (for the extra strength bonuses) and then Falcon Knight and you can just have her switch back and forth pending on the map until she reaches Falcon Knight. By then at least if you want her to use something like defiant avoid + alert stance with the cursed ashiya sword and score crits then she is your girl (sorry Annette).

[Gordin]

6 hours ago, drattakbowser said:

NG or NG+ it's equal, No paid DLC i told you no Anna and Ashen Wolves. Count and grinding no care. Factors. Because if we do 4 tier or more it's very too much and the team have 12 unit to deployed maximum in the last map ! What 11 character are bad ? Cyril I know he weak because joining late his flying is E, if you recruit him earlier in Blue Lions and Golden Deer you can quickly increase flying.

A NG+ tier list is useless because weapon ranks don't mean crap in NG+

[lenticular]

9 hours ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

I definitely disagree. Ingrid can absolutely still double things in Maddening. With Darting Blow (and optional Speed+2 and/or Weight-3) she can get her player phase speed close to 50 by endgame without any stat boosters, which is enough to double all but the fastest enemies e.g. assassins and falconknights (who are relatively squishy and thus easily killable by brave weapons and brave combat arts). If you do farm speed boosters she can double even more. And even if you don't, her good speed lets her double/quad a variety of midrange speed enemies like paladins, most magic units, warriors, bow users, etc., which many other units will struggle to double.

What sort of level are you expecting to end up by end game? Because getting much above low 40s seems ambitious to me, even factoring in darting blow. Admitedly, I generally skip Speed +2 and go for Reposition instead and that might be hurting me.

9 hours ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

I also find Ingrid's Alert Stance+ dodgetank build much more useful in Maddening (it's overkill in Hard), and due to her strength in flying she gets there before most other people (Petra is the other main candidate). The other characters with strength in flying are either significantly slower, inclined more towards magic, and/or join late and thus behind on flying exp.

I'm ot really a fan of dodge-tanking in maddening, because of its susceptibility to gambits. That's probably more of a play-style thing than anything else.

[Dark Holy Elf]

15 minutes ago, lenticular said:

What sort of level are you expecting to end up by end game? Because getting much above low 40s seems ambitious to me, even factoring in darting blow. Admitedly, I generally skip Speed +2 and go for Reposition instead and that might be hurting me.

I was assuming around Level 40 or so (I tend to use 41 for easy math). For instance, Level 41 Ingrid has 8 base + around 40*0.7=28 if we assume 70% growth (lower if/when she dips out of Pegasus Knight, but higher as Falcon) + 5 from Falcon Knight's class mod = 41 speed, +6 from Darting Blow is 47. Obviously you can quibble the exact number a bit in either direction (it's hugely variable with stat boosters being a thing), but the point is this is very high. Leonie and Petra can hit similar benchmarks, but it's a significant improvement on say Felix (-6 from no Darting Blow, +1 base, -2 from personal growth, -1 from less access to pegasus knight growth both before and after recruitment), let alone actually slow units.

 

27 minutes ago, lenticular said:

I'm ot really a fan of dodge-tanking in maddening, because of its susceptibility to gambits. That's probably more of a play-style thing than anything else.

At worst, it's great at baiting groups of enemies who lack gambits, which are pretty common. At best, you make a point of optimizing your dodge-tank's charm and gambits have only 8% real hit on them. Ingrid even has one of the highest charm stats of a non-lord. And if there's a rare formation where you judge the risk too high, you can always pull out the Impregnable Wall gambit, but it's nice to not have to retreat to that too often, both because it's limited and also because a dodge-tank can actually counter for more than 1 damage

[lenticular]

13 minutes ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

I was assuming around Level 40 or so (I tend to use 41 for easy math). For instance, Level 41 Ingrid has 8 base + around 40*0.7=28 if we assume 70% growth (lower if/when she dips out of Pegasus Knight, but higher as Falcon) + 5 from Falcon Knight's class mod = 41 speed, +6 from Darting Blow is 47. Obviously you can quibble the exact number a bit in either direction (it's hugely variable with stat boosters being a thing), but the point is this is very high. Leonie and Petra can hit similar benchmarks, but it's a significant improvement on say Felix (-6 from no Darting Blow, +1 base, -2 from personal growth, -1 from less access to pegasus knight growth both before and after recruitment), let alone actually slow units.

I'm an idiot. I was forgetting to factor in the +5 from falcon knight. Yeah, you're totally right here.

14 minutes ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

At worst, it's great at baiting groups of enemies who lack gambits, which are pretty common. At best, you make a point of optimizing your dodge-tank's charm and gambits have only 8% real hit on them. Ingrid even has one of the highest charm stats of a non-lord. And if there's a rare formation where you judge the risk too high, you can always pull out the Impregnable Wall gambit, but it's nice to not have to retreat to that too often, both because it's limited and also because a dodge-tank can actually counter for more than 1 damage

Yeah, I'm not saying it can't be effective, more that it's not something I like to use. I know that I always forget to check for enemy battalions and so get surprised when they do pull out gambits, so I play accordingly.

[Bartozio]

16 hours ago, lenticular said:

For me, it depends on difficulty level, with Ingrid having a huge drop off from hard to maddening. Her two greatest assets are her speed and her versatility. 60% speed growth is good enough that she will routinely be doubling pretty much everything on hard (or normal). In terms of versatility, she's easy to build into pretty much any class you want, except for the male-only ones. She has no skill weaknesses, is moderately ok in both strength and magic, has a decent enough spell list (notably thoron and physic), and decent enough combat arts. Basically, she's a good all-rounder with her one exceptional feature being her speed. I find her a really fun unit to use in hard. Put her into maddening, and it's a different story, though. Maddening emphasises specialists over generalists, and also really devalues speed, by making it impossible to keep up with the enemy stat scaling.

My thoughts on her are basically the opposite. She can be a decent mage, sure, but she's probably not going to be a decent mage while also being a good physical unit on the same run.

As a mage, she'd start behind on weapon ranks (hard E/E in Reason/Faith when you get her) and even when you grid her up, she's comparable to most other magic inclined units at best (most of which I have in midtier).

There's several classes that carry a unit, so her being decent as those classes isn't really a strong argument I feel. I'll admit I was mostly considering Maddening, but in hard I found most units can double reliably, which makes Ingrids lower damage output stand out more.

Quote

For the wider topic, I rank Cyril incredibly low in SS because of his late joining. Since you only get him in chapter 12, he's much harder to train up, he's left with commoner growths up until you do get him, and you don't even get the benefit of his super early PBV. He's really hard to justify using for any reason beyond "I like him" or "I felt like it".

I mostly put him in mid because he can still be great with vengeance and PBV. I was already debating whether he'd be low or mid tier though. I think they still give a nice niche, but arguably not enough to justify using him on this route.

10 hours ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

I definitely disagree. Ingrid can absolutely still double things in Maddening. With Darting Blow (and optional Speed+2 and/or Weight-3) she can get her player phase speed close to 50 by endgame without any stat boosters, which is enough to double all but the fastest enemies e.g. assassins and falconknights (who are relatively squishy and thus easily killable by brave weapons and brave combat arts). If you do farm speed boosters she can double even more. And even if you don't, her good speed lets her double/quad a variety of midrange speed enemies like paladins, most magic units, warriors, bow users, etc., which many other units will struggle to double.

I don't dissagree that Ingrid can double in maddening, but mostly because I got people like Dimitri and Byleth to double those same enemies you describe. Darting blow can push a lot of people into the doubling midrange enemies range, and a lot of units get ways to kill enemies regardless of having the speed to double. Ingrid being able to deal with them isn't all that special, especially near endgame.

10 hours ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

I also find Ingrid's Alert Stance+ dodgetank build much more useful in Maddening (it's overkill in Hard), and due to her strength in flying she gets there before most other people (Petra is the other main candidate). The other characters with strength in flying are either significantly slower, inclined more towards magic, and/or join late and thus behind on flying exp.

This I can see. I feel like Vantage+Wrath builds are better, but it's easier to get I guess. Still though, she'll get it a little earlier than most units (Petra actually also has a strength in flying btw), but that doesn't mean other units can't do it as well. I'd argue someone like Ashe would on average be, what, 3 to 4 points slower than her by endgame? That's 3-4% less hit on enemies, which is nice to have, but not exactly game changing. And that's endgame, the difference will be less before then.

10 hours ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

She has some flaws like mediocre bases (although on SS you largely bypass those, enemy pegknight growths helps her a bunch) and weak str growth but she's still a good unit.

Just for my understanding, what do you mean by a good unit in this context? I'm definitely not arguing Ingrid is unusable or will never contribute meaningfully to a party, but I feel like she doesn't really do anything to stand out. I could see her be on the lower end of midtier for dodgetanking and doubling things a little earlier than other units maybe, but not much higher than that.

[Dark Holy Elf]

4 hours ago, Bartozio said:

I don't dissagree that Ingrid can double in maddening, but mostly because I got people like Dimitri and Byleth to double those same enemies you describe. Darting blow can push a lot of people into the doubling midrange enemies range, and a lot of units get ways to kill enemies regardless of having the speed to double. Ingrid being able to deal with them isn't all that special, especially near endgame.

Ingrid is significantly faster than Dimitri and MByleth (probably around 10 points by the game's end), and somewhat faster than FByleth (+15% growth works out to around 6 points at the end of the game; Byleth will likely be a couple levels higher due to her personal but Ingrid gets those extra levels with pegasus knight growths). Given equal treatment, there will be some enemies she doubles that they don't. If you get the slower characters to double paladins, then the same effort will see Ingrid doubling heroes and wyverns. If you get the slower units to double heroes and wyverns, Ingrid will be doubling falconknights and assassins. etc.

4 hours ago, Bartozio said:

This I can see. I feel like Vantage+Wrath builds are better, but it's easier to get I guess. Still though, she'll get it a little earlier than most units (Petra actually also has a strength in flying btw), but that doesn't mean other units can't do it as well. I'd argue someone like Ashe would on average be, what, 3 to 4 points slower than her by endgame? That's 3-4% less hit on enemies, which is nice to have, but not exactly game changing. And that's endgame, the difference will be less before then.

I definitely feel Vantage+Wrath is significantly inferior. It requires you gain 250 total class exp in a pair of weak classes, eats two skill slots instead of one, requires an HP threshold to be maintained (leaving the character more vulnerable to anything which does connect) and constant Retribution support, and then has a host of extra vulnerabilities with evade builds don't: ballistas/fire orbs, and anything bulky enough to survive a countercrit (monsters for sure, but other enemies are possible depending on your unit's strength), in addition to the gambit vulnerability both share. If you meant battalion wrath/vantage, that's another matter: it's significantly better due to not requiring a pair of awkward class masteries or maintaining low HP. It's also only available to one unit and that unit is locked to one route, and not the route being discussed here.

Petra is indeed the other best candidate for this build, as I mentioned. Ferdinand should also be mentioned: he takes significantly longer to get Alert Stance+, but his personal is very nice for the build.

Ashe joins with an E in flying to Ingrid's D and is not strong in flying, and can not even get into a flying class until Level 20. All of this adds up to Ingrid getting Alert Stance+ significantly sooner, in addition to her advantage in speed. Yes, you can build Ashe this way, but he's obviously worse than it, which ties into what you said about niches; she has one here, he doesn't.

4 hours ago, Bartozio said:

Just for my understanding, what do you mean by a good unit in this context? I'm definitely not arguing Ingrid is unusable or will never contribute meaningfully to a party, but I feel like she doesn't really do anything to stand out

I feel like her speed and dodgetanking stands out pretty well myself; the only other units who compare to her are already in High. As for "good", I tend to mean I think she is above average. Just comparing her to physical units (since magical units play a different role), I would personally rank her above every physical unit you have in Mid, and below most of the ones you have in High... and even then I find some of those debatable, like Bernadetta and SS Felix (to be clear, I think AM Felix is better than AM Ingrid, but on SS Ingrid gets slightly better and Felix gets notably worse due to missing the good earlygame and having a terrible default skill focus).

[drattakbowser]

Guys we are in the tier list , no description !! Please choose character in the high/medium/low tier list. No many description !

[GarEEE]

High Tier : Byleth, Petra, Bernadetta, Lysithea, Linhardt, Leonie, Shamir, (Seteth)

Medium Tier : Sylvain, Caspar, Ferdinand, Marianne, Flayn, Hilda, Ingrid, Annette, Lorenz, Felix, Dorothea, Catherine,

Low Tier : Ashe, Alois, Hanneman, Manuela, Raphael, Ignatz, Cyril

 

Take my rating for Seteth with a big grain of salt, as I haven't really used him in Maddening yet.

[Shadow Mir]

3 hours ago, drattakbowser said:

Guys we are in the tier list , no description !! Please choose character in the high/medium/low tier list. No many description !

Then what in the name of Arceus is the point of this tier list?

[SumG]

20 hours ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

Petra is indeed the other best candidate for this build, as I mentioned. Ferdinand should also be mentioned: he takes significantly longer to get Alert Stance+, but his personal is very nice for the build.

I think Petra is a comparable dodgetank to Ingrid for physical attacks, but Ingrid is significantly better than Petra regarding magic attacks.

Since magic and physical avoid rates are calculated differently in Three Houses, it isn't uncommon for physical hit rates to by down in the 10% range (which are low enough to effectively be zero) while magic hit rates are still in the 30+% range (which is too large to ignore).  (The big difference is that physical avoid has a component based on Action Speed, while magical avoid gets (Speed + Luck)/2.  For really fast units like Petra or Ingrid, this can result in a loss of 10-20% evasion on magic attacks.)  Ingrid doesn't get significantly more evasion on magic attacks than Petra, but she take the hit much, much more easily due to her monster resistance and typical end game class (Falcon Knight).  Meanwhile, Petra has one of the lowest resistance growths in the game, and typically ends up in a low resistance class (Wyvern Lord).

Overall, I think Petra is a stronger unit than Ingrid, but I think if you're looking purely for a dodgetank Ingrid is the better all around option.

[Dark Holy Elf]

@SumG Yeah, those are good points and I agree.

[drattakbowser]

20 hours ago, Shadow Mir said:

Then what in the name of Arceus is the point of this tier list?

None.