Flying Classes vs Grounded Classes

[Whisky]

6 hours ago, Shanty Pete's 1st Mate said:

That part is debatable, as Great Knight isn't a strict upgrade from Fortress Knight. The class loses a bit of physical bulk, and while its Speed improves, forgoing innate Weight-5 tends to undermine this. Lancefaire is nice, but if you're already training in Lances and Riding, Paladin has better movement and (hilariously) Strength than Great Knight. So GK is kind of a compromise class - losing some bulk from Fortress, and some move from Paladin. That said, I have used the class on Gilbert and Balthus, and got decent mileage out of it.

Fortress Knight only has 2 more Def than Great Knight. Great Knight has 3 more Move and Canto. I see it as a huge improvement. 4 Move is just too low. Not that I’m a huge fan of Great Knight or anything. One of Great Knight’s biggest issues is that it requires high investment. I don’t like armors much in general though. Especially since Fortress Knights look ridiculous. Then used to look really cool. Most of the characters geared towards armor classes can just be a Grappler or WarMaster for much better offense which I find more useful most of the time.

[Jotari]

11 hours ago, Agro said:

Seriously, do none of you use Brave weapons or something?

You know, honestly not in Three Houses. I find myself giving them a lot to my units, but more frequently than not the hit rates are risky enough that I usually want to use a combat art instead. Two hits means twice the chance to miss versus a single stronger attack, course missing that single stronger attack has a larger downside than missing one of two hits on a brave weapon, but most combat arts to give that critical boost to hit as well (by critical there I mean important and not like a crit rate, course lots of them do that too). In fact, given combat arts (and thus durability issues) and hit rates, Training Weapons tend to be my most frequently used weapons in Three Houses.

Edited January 13, 2021 by Jotari

[Agro]

5 hours ago, Jotari said:

You know, honestly not in Three Houses. I find myself giving them a lot to my units, but more frequently than not the hit rates are risky enough that I usually want to use a combat art instead. Two hits means twice the chance to miss versus a single stronger attack, course missing that single stronger attack has a larger downside than missing one of two hits on a brave weapon, but most combat arts to give that critical boost to hit as well (by critical there I mean important and not like a crit rate, course lots of them do that too). In fact, given combat arts (and thus durability issues) and hit rates, Training Weapons tend to be my most frequently used weapons in Three Houses.

My point was that most of the complaints levelled at Wyvern Lord's combat are pretty easily fixed with Brave Axe+. Between Str +2, Death Blow and Axefaire you're already stacking an extra 26 damage in one battle without taking a counterattack, and that's not even including battalion bonuses and the unit's stat. Even units like Gilbert become suddenly useful by turning into flying Brave Axe wielders. Your character does not need a single point of speed to do this.

Sure, they're heavy, but that's what Canto and Trade is for.

Also, you won't get hit on EP if all the enemies are dead.

Edited January 13, 2021 by Agro

[Dark Holy Elf]

48 minutes ago, Agro said:

My point was that most of the complaints levelled at Wyvern Lord's combat are pretty easily fixed with Brave Axe+. Between Str +2, Death Blow and Axefaire you're already stacking an extra 26 damage in one battle without taking a counterattack, and that's not even including battalion bonuses and the unit's stat. Even units like Gilbert become suddenly useful by turning into flying Brave Axe wielders. Your character does not need a single point of speed to do this.

Sure, they're heavy, but that's what Canto and Trade is for.

Also, you won't get hit on EP if all the enemies are dead.

To add onto this, they're not even that heavy, especially when considering Wyvern Lord's speed/strength and how tempting armour ranks are for any axe-user (giving Weight-3). With 35 strength and Weight-3, a Wyvern Lord loses 4 spd from a Brave Axe, giving them a speed modifier of... 0. That's 3 less than Grappler, 2 less than War Master, 1 less than mounted Paladin, equal to Sniper, and 1 more than mounted Paladin, for some examples of ground classes. And then all the other brave weapons are lighter (and usually you will want different people using different ones to best exploit monster weaknesses). So yes, not only do canto, flight, and trade make it an incredibly easy weakness to mitigate, it's not even much of a weakness (especially compared to some setups which require a PC just not take hits on the enemy phase period, such as Vengeance, or some mages).

[Whisky]

Jotari’s issue with Brave weapons seemed to be accuracy though, not weight.

 

I find this game to be very player phase focused. You can do a lot on player phase. You can clear out groups of enemies on player phase so that you don’t have to worry about them much on enemy phase. A lot of abilities benefit the player a lot more on player phase than on enemy phase. There are powerful CAs that can only be used on player phase, including the previously mentioned Encloser. Abilities like Death Blow and Darting Blow only work on player phase. In many ways on this game, the best defense, is a good player phase offense. Enemies can’t kill you if they’re dead (or Enclosed). Impregnable Wall is a very useful and versatile ability that makes it easy to keep your units alive on enemy phase, so they can be ready to kill the enemies on player phase. Extra mobility abilities like Stride and Warp also increase your options on player phase and make it easier for you to do whatever you need to do. Brave weapons themselves increase your options and ability to kill enemies on player phase. Basically I’m saying that I don’t see higher weight to be a huge deal anyway, and Brave weapons double automatically so it doesn’t matter for that either. Accuracy might be an issue though.

Edited January 13, 2021 by Whisky

[SumG]

On 1/12/2021 at 8:19 PM, Dark Holy Elf said:

Wyvern Edelgard is probably the best unit in the game. Hilda and Sylvain are definitely solid; they still do very well following the flowchart above (with Sylvain having the added benefit of Swift Strikes access especially with Spear of Assal/Horseslayer, while Hilda has an unusually good OHKO option with her relic). Sylvain might be able to do a bit more damage as a Paladin than a Wyvern Lord, but I dunno that it's worth the loss of flight.

Perhaps this is just the way that I approach the game, but I don't put nearly as much value in the Combat Arts as most other players seem to.  I prefer to use them extremely situationally (e.g. to get a bit more damage or accuracy to finish off an enemy when dealing with some action economy issues).  I'm much less interested in units that need to use Combat Arts, and without that can't be effective.

Edelgard's Raging Storm certainly has the largest single turn damage potential in the game and is super tanky in White Clouds, but if you're not interested in blowing through your entire Aymr durability in a single turn she's pretty lackluster in Crimson Rose.  She has nowhere near the speed to be relevant and not enough evasion to be a frontline fighter on Maddening.

On 1/12/2021 at 12:57 PM, Marienburg said:

Well, no, Hilda and Edelgard do fine as wyverns because of darting blow

That just isn't true by the endgame of Maddening.  Darting Blow can cover a good number of sins, but it can't make up for Edelgard's below average speed growth.

Sylvain (and Ferdinand and Seteth) can be a bit more viable due to Swift Strikes, but I still dislike using those units as regular attackers.  Swift Strikes tears through weapon durability, and while repair items are not incredibly rare, they are limited (particularly higher tier repair items required for high rank weapons).  And as good as Swift Strikes is, it does nothing on Enemy Phase, where faster units have so much less to worry about just by virtue of facing fewer attack per combat.

[Dark Holy Elf]

47 minutes ago, SumG said:

Edelgard's Raging Storm certainly has the largest single turn damage potential in the game and is super tanky in White Clouds, but if you're not interested in blowing through your entire Aymr durability in a single turn she's pretty lackluster in Crimson Rose.  She has nowhere near the speed to be relevant and not enough evasion to be a frontline fighter on Maddening.

Even without Raging Storm, Edelgard's ridiculous strength means she should be ORKOing pretty much everything in Crimson Flower. She's fast enough to double slow-to-midspeed enemies and should be able to one-shot the faster, frailer ones, either with brave or with a CA from a Silver Axe+. And anyway, the only CF characters significantly faster than Edelgard are Petra, Leonie, and Ingrid (a few others are similar, like FByleth, Felix, and Jeritza).

She won't be as good a dodgetank as Petra (flying boon, higher AS) or Ferdinand (+15 avo at full health), but she has enough concrete durability to take a hit or two, and charm to not fear enemy gambits.

[Barren]

1 hour ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

Even without Raging Storm, Edelgard's ridiculous strength means she should be ORKOing pretty much everything in Crimson Flower. She's fast enough to double slow-to-midspeed enemies and should be able to one-shot the faster, frailer ones, either with brave or with a CA from a Silver Axe+. And anyway, the only CF characters significantly faster than Edelgard are Petra, Leonie, and Ingrid (a few others are similar, like FByleth, Felix, and Jeritza).

She won't be as good a dodgetank as Petra (flying boon, higher AS) or Ferdinand (+15 avo at full health), but she has enough concrete durability to take a hit or two, and charm to not fear enemy gambits.

This is also one of those cases where a Wyvern Lord Edelgard is better than her cannon class Emperor. Which is to me a bit of a shame because the Emperor class only beats Wyvern Lord in terms of HP, Defense and Charm though by only a margin.

Yes her Supreme Armor Co. Battalion has a better AoE radius and damage than about any other flying battalion, but that hardly matters when you look at what Wyvern Lord offers for El.

Edited January 14, 2021 by Barren

[Jotari]

5 hours ago, Barren said:

This is also one of those cases where a Wyvern Lord Edelgard is better than her cannon class Emperor. Which is to me a bit of a shame because the Emperor class only beats Wyvern Lord in terms of HP, Defense and Charm though by only a margin.

Yes her Supreme Armor Co. Battalion has a better AoE radius and damage than about any other flying battalion, but that hardly matters when you look at what Wyvern Lord offers for El.

Not to mention she only gets Emperor for like two chapters. For much of Crimson Flower she's stuck in the even worse Armoured Lord class. Emperor would be kind of okay if you could get it earlier and thus use Fickle Flower (though 1 range encloser on Edelgard doesn't seem like the most useful thing in the world for her stats). The intermediate Lord exclusive classes have no reason to exist imo. By the time part 2 starts you already have Byleth as an enlightened one which is like a master class, and most of the units in your army, lords included, are reaching master class levels of promotion already (and there's not even that much of a difference between advance and master classes). They could have just had all the lords start with Emperor, Great Lord and Barbossa from the start of Part 2. It's not like they're even functionally that different as classes (and Pomp and Circumstance is far from the most useful skill in the game, and even if it is better than I'm giving it credit for, it could have been implemented in a different way, like giving it with Emperor and co in addition to a combat art).

Also I'll never stop asking for Emperor to be able to use magic. That it doesn't need it because bolting axes exist isn't a great argument as it wouldn't actually take away from the class and would be hella cool to use.

Edited January 14, 2021 by Jotari

[Agro]

10 hours ago, Jotari said:

By the time part 2 starts you already have Byleth as an enlightened one which is like a master class, and most of the units in your army, lords included, are reaching master class levels of promotion already (and there's not even that much of a difference between advance and master classes).

The Advanced lord classes are fail-safes for newcomers/n00bs who didn't invest into their lords for whatever reason, or went with a weird build and ended up with a suboptimal lord.

[Jotari]

45 minutes ago, Agro said:

The Advanced lord classes are fail-safes for newcomers/n00bs who didn't invest into their lords for whatever reason, or went with a weird build and ended up with a suboptimal lord.

Yeah, but I'm saying they come late enough in the game that you could ditch the intermediate classes and give us the lord's final better classes as soon as part 2 starts.

[Barren]

2 hours ago, Jotari said:

Yeah, but I'm saying they come late enough in the game that you could ditch the intermediate classes and give us the lord's final better classes as soon as part 2 starts.

The thing about ditching the lord class is that for better or worse, the Lord class is one of the more iconic classes in the series because how it defines some of the main characters i.e Chrom.

I don’t think getting rid of them would solve this issue but I do agree it would be needing an overhaul.

The thing about the lord class is that it’s the only intermediate class that gives you bonus exp in authority. Like how pegasus knights gives more exp in flying and so forth.

Their growths are only okay since HP, dex and charm are some good traits for the class. I can also concur that Resistance +2 and the Subdue combat art are not great mastery skills at all. The only niche I see with Res +2 is that it combos with Edelgard’s post time skip ability which grants her Res + 4 when using the wait command. It’s essentially Dedue’s Personal Ability Staunch Shield except for him it grants him defense.

Except that Dedue’s ability IMO is more useful and assuming you pick the Blue Lions it’s there at the beginning of the game.

Maybe if the Lord Class brought back Aether as an ability and Dual Strike as a sword Combat Art or something similar maybe it’d be worth it. Especially since you can carry Subdue over with you anyways (at least I think you can, could be wrong).

[Jotari]

48 minutes ago, Barren said:

The thing about ditching the lord class is that for better or worse, the Lord class is one of the more iconic classes in the series because how it defines some of the main characters i.e Chrom.

I don’t think getting rid of them would solve this issue but I do agree it would be needing an overhaul.

The thing about the lord class is that it’s the only intermediate class that gives you bonus exp in authority. Like how pegasus knights gives more exp in flying and so forth.

Their growths are only okay since HP, dex and charm are some good traits for the class. I can also concur that Resistance +2 and the Subdue combat art are not great mastery skills at all. The only niche I see with Res +2 is that it combos with Edelgard’s post time skip ability which grants her Res + 4 when using the wait command. It’s essentially Dedue’s Personal Ability Staunch Shield except for him it grants him defense.

Except that Dedue’s ability IMO is more useful and assuming you pick the Blue Lions it’s there at the beginning of the game.

Maybe if the Lord Class brought back Aether as an ability and Dual Strike as a sword Combat Art or something similar maybe it’d be worth it. Especially since you can carry Subdue over with you anyways (at least I think you can, could be wrong).

I'm not talking about the Lord class. Bad terminology on my part. The Lord class is fine. By intermediate I meant literally the middle exclusive class. Ie, Armoured Lord, High Lord and Wyvern Master. These three classes are just worse versions of the classes you get three chapters later. There's really no need for both them and the final exclusive clasess the lords get, especially since Byleth already gained their final level exclusive class two chapters ago by that point.

Edited January 15, 2021 by Jotari

[Barren]

53 minutes ago, Jotari said:

I'm not talking about the Lord class. Bad terminology on my part. The Lord class is fine. By intermediate I meant literally the middle exclusive class. Ie, Armoured Lord, High Lord and Wyvern Master. These three classes are just worse versions of the classes you get three chapters later. There's really no need for both them and the final exclusive clasess the lords get, especially since Byleth already gained their final level exclusive class two chapters ago by that point.

Ahh gotcha. I should have asked for more context before I responded. I guess I way you worded got me thinking that you meant the class should be dropped. I most likely just misunderstood what you meant by that 

[Shanty Pete's 1st Mate]

5 hours ago, Jotari said:

I'm not talking about the Lord class. Bad terminology on my part. The Lord class is fine. By intermediate I meant literally the middle exclusive class. Ie, Armoured Lord, High Lord and Wyvern Master. These three classes are just worse versions of the classes you get three chapters later. There's really no need for both them and the final exclusive clasess the lords get, especially since Byleth already gained their final level exclusive class two chapters ago by that point.

Agreed - just do Emperor, Great Lord, and Barbarossa from chapter 13. They can keep their modifiers and skills, but adopt the bases of Armored Lord, High Lord, and Wyvern Master, respectively. The mastery skill "Pomp & Circumstance" can come with the respective combat arts, when mastering their personal Lord class.