Maddening - What should I be spending my time doing?

[Karrius]

So I've just finished up my first run through of three houses, doing hard mode BE Edelgard route (after not playing a FE since the GBA!), and found it pretty easy overall. For my next playthrough, I'm thinking of doing a Maddening Golden Deer, no NG+, and was looking for some advice.

I've seen a lot of people disagree on the best way to spend time - some have suggested using the sauna and classrooms to train up skills, while others insist on ignoring them and just doing one exploration a week, and then aux battles, to get all that class XP. I was leaning towards the second, but was worried if fights would give enough money to keep weapons in good shape, and if  weapon skills would fall behind. How has either plan particularly worked for you?

In addition, do you normally have 9 good fighters + a dancer for your route, or do you focus on less, and have the others there for rallying? I didn't use rallying at all, but it seems to be a pretty big deal for maddening runs from what people say. I'd like to use as many of the GD characters as possible, just to see their support conversations and stuff, but also understand if I've gotta swap some out for better characters.

[LoneStar]

From my experience weapon durability is only a worry for the first few chapters, because you're going to be spamming combat arts. The enemies from the aux maps drop bullions, so that helps. It's good to do Monastery at least once a month to refresh motivation and all that other stuff. Getting all of those pretime skip paralogues done will take up most of you weekly battles when they come by. I tend to do exploration twice more often that battle twice, since you get 3 battles eventually and doing 6 battles in a month gets pretty tedious, and even 4 when you're not trying to knock out paralogues.

I played every route on Maddening with in house characters so it's not really that bad if you give them good sets. So you can do your in house characters +3, and 3 more as adjutants. I used a bunch of offensive units, a Dancer, and some Mages that can either heal or deal chip damage. You're definitely going to want to learn some strats because Maddening requires you to know and use the game mechanics, unlike Hard mode which you can sleep through.

[Barren]

I’m currently on my maddening run myself. You're right about people having different methods on approaching maddening mode and there's nothing wrong with any of them. Plus you should be able to play maddening your own way as well. I do however like to offer a few tips on what you can do if that is okay. 

Before you get started (assuming you haven’t yet), You should plan out what characters you plan on using whether it’s someone you have off the bat or someone you plan on recruiting. Another thing is if you plan on recruiting someone when do you do it and how. There some benefits and in other cases downsides to recruiting someone early or late. 

For example, say you want to recruit Ingrid into your house, getting your Flying rank up to D and your dex stat up to 15 is relatively very easy to do early in the game. If you recruit her between chapters 3 - 5, she'll be soldier and while that can mean you'll have more time to develop her into what you want her to be, her stats won't necessarily be good. Simply put: the game auto levels their stats based on their current class every month. To give you an idea on what I mean by that, Ingrid as a level 9 soldier will have a speed stat of 13 if you happen to recruit her by chapter 5. If you however wait until chapter 6 to recruit her, she'll already be a Pegasus Knight at level 11 with 19 speed. That's quite a jump for her. She'll also come with 16 res as well so she can take magic damage very well. 13 strength so she's at least somewhat strong at dealing damage. Of course to do that, you'll want your Flying rank at D by chapter 5 because neither Seteth or Manuela will be available for tutoring by chapter 6. You would want to at least raise Ingrid's authority to rank D if you want her to use a flying battalion though. But you'll get Rally Magic along the way so it's worth the investment I think. You also need your dex stat to be at 15 so be aware of that.

Another good example is Petra. She is someone I personally would consider recruiting late (like around chapter 10) because her sword and axe rank should be at rank B, or at least very close to it. Her flying rank like Ingrid is also at rank D, but with little investing you can get her flying rank up to D+ (or C if you want 100% success rate) with her axe rank already at B. Have her certify as a Brigand so she can get Death Blow and then she'll easily jump right into Wyvern Rider. Same deal with Ingrid when it comes to raising her authority to rank D if you want her to use a flying battalion. I tend to recruit her by raising my support rank with her up to B.

I tend to spend my activity points at the monastery by doing a mixture of meal sharing, choir, and faculty drills on areas I need to work on in order to recruit someone. I also like to fish because it helps with growing your professor rank and if you have DLC you can feed some of the cats and dogs to get ores. I've gotten quite a lot of Mythril and Wootz Steel by doing that. Speaking of fishing, if there is one piece of advice I can give you, take full advantage of 12/9 in chapter 9 because while you're trying to make someone your dancer, there is an event called fist full of fish. It grants you much more experience while getting much more fish. I've increased my professor rank by 2 doing that. Then there is the green house, simply: keep plating seeds that are 4 -5 stars. They give you more professor rank experience that way and sometimes they even drop a Rocky Burdock.

I also like to use the rusted/broken weapon grind trick on an auxiliary battle (particularly the yellow exclamation battles where you get more money since money is tight in maddening). Basically you kill everyone there except for an enemy priest or bishop that has renewal. Make them waste their spells while ensuring that your units don't die, then keep using your broken/rusted weapons to increase your weapons rank and to help you master classes as well. It is tedious but it works. Just be aware of a 99 turn limit.

One more thing: Chapter 13. Please for your sake make a couple or so save files to save your sanity. The game will force you right into chapter 13 with no prep screen and you have to deal with 42 enemies (3 more appear once you kill a fake Pallardo then the real one shows up). It is a very hard battle, probably the hardest in the game if you're not prepared for it. I made sure at least 3 of my units have Swordbreaker because hitting the thieves, mercenaries and assassins reliably can be a pain and you need to ensure the KO or you at least survive a round without getting hit because power creep shows up. If you have fliers, watch out for the archers and snipers. Be on the look out for those brawlers and grapplers too as they too can move through bushes no problem and one round you. Claude's battalion is a god send if you can someone manage to line up the enemies correctly and hit everyone. It helped me immensely. Having someone in the Golden Deer as a dancer also helps (for me I picked Marianne). Raphael had high enough HP to survive one round against an Assassin, thank god. So he was able to soften one of them up enough for Lysithea to finish him off. But yea, if you're not ready for that fight, you can find yourself soft locked. Plus if you want a fighting chance in the event that happens, you'll have to do chapter 12 all over again. So don't let that happen.

If you would rather not have to deal with them all, there is Mekkah's video on how to approach the fight and end it very quickly.

However you want to approach your run is up to you. As long as you have a plan in motion, invest wisely and who you want to use on your team, you should be in good shape.

Edited January 30, 2021 by Barren

[SnowFire]

You definitely don't need to bother with auxiliary battle grinding, which gets you very little aside from class and skill levels, neither of which are that important after you get the key basic skills from the Intermediate tiers.  Also, this is inherently a personal opinion, but doing broken weapon grinding just isn't very fun.  If you really do want to do some light auxiliary battle grinding, then I would at least recommend waiting a bit until you hit Prof Rank C+ to start hitting the Aux battles, as you'll at least have two battles a weekend to spend then; Aux battles are very "expensive" before that.  You'll also probably have unlocked the Saint Statues; invest in Class Rank +1 ASAP, and that should help deal with class rank issues.  (No shame in hanging around in Monk / Soldier / etc. a little extra-long to finish off the class mastery, too.)

While on the Professor XP note, the more early Professor XP you get, the more actions you have, which makes each subsequent Explore better. This is why people recommend spamming Explore, at least early (C2-6 or so).  If you want to optimize / FAQ something that's easy and quick, I'd recommend FAQing the lecture questions.  The "best" response offers a rather huge Professor XP bonus.  As noted above, optimizing Prof XP gain is pretty powerful, essentially making every action more efficient.  On that note, it's very highly against flavor, but if you intentionally let Flayn stay captured underground and just spam Explore a lot during the week of C6, that also helps launch your Prof XP growth faster.

You will want to build 12 units, so more than just 9 + a dancer, really.  (Unless you weren't counting healers, in which case sure, 9 fighters + dancer + 2 healers).  You can get by with fewer but the "default" way to play Maddening is very player phase oriented, so the more units the better.  Low-manning strats tend to involve riskier enemy-phase strats that only come online later in the game anyway - stuff like Vantage / Wrath.  

Rally skills aren't that important unless you're doing stuff like Vantage / Wrath above, IMO (wherein you want Rally Str or the like to ensure KOs).  Skill slots are precious, they eat a skill slot, a Rally is usually better replaced by just Curved Shot chipping vs. the vast majority of enemies that don't pack the Counterattack skill.  That said.  Ignatz gets Rally Speed very early, and that is genuinely handy against no-cheating real badasses - yeah, I'm basically talking about the Death Knight here.  So using Ignatz's rally early is fine, although he'll eventually find better things to spend that skill slot on.

The Sauna is most useful if you're either catching up a late-joiner, or if you're going against the grain and trying to build up a unit's weaknesses.  The Sauna boost is flat, works the same for a Strength or Weakness skill, so it's more useful if you're using it to, say, teach Hilda Authority or Raphael Bows or whatever it is you're gunning for.  I'd keep that in mind when choosing which unit to Sauna up.

Edited January 30, 2021 by SnowFire

[Karrius]

Thanks for all the advice! I'll plan out my group ahead of time, and can't wait to get into it.

[Dark Holy Elf]

I echo everything @SnowFire has said. Explore is very powerful, especially early, and letting your builds snowball.

Chapter 13 is absolutely a map I recommend keeping in mind for your builds. In particular, it's a map that is MUCH easier if you have levelled the characters who show up on the west side of the map. (The ones who show up on the east aren't nearly as important, because they start in a secure area where no enemies can attack them unless you choose to break the barriers and move out of it.) For the Deer, the characters who start in the west side are:

Spoiler

Byleth, Claude, Ignatz, Lorenz, Hilda, and Leonie. (So everyone except Marianne, Raphael, and Lysithea.)

The more effective those characters are the easier you will find the chapter. Some things that can help (you don't need to do all of these, but):

• choose your dancer from this group
• make sure that at the end of Chapter 12, your most valuable equipment (such as relics) and best battalions given to the people in this group
• anyone who can deal high magic damage (in this case, Lorenz) should be set up for that, since enemies in the map have low res and can be OHKOed in terrain-ignoring fashion by magical combat arts or high-power spells (the former is even better since some enemies have Tomebreaker+)

[Barren]

1 hour ago, Karrius said:

Thanks for all the advice! I'll plan out my group ahead of time, and can't wait to get into it.

No problem. And good luck! 

[SumG]

Rally abilities are a necessity in the early game if you're going NG and not NG+.  They fade away in utility after you get your units to Intermediate tier classes, but until then Ignatz is an MVP.

If you're looking to recruit units, your highest priority targets should be units that are extremely fast (Petra, Felix, and Ingrid, probably in that order) or units that can get to early Brave Combat Arts (Ferdinand and Sylvain).  Mercedes is a nice recruit as well for a white mage, but isn't as necessary.  Catherine is useful throughout Maddening, though she's nearly an automatic recruit.

Also, female melee units have a huge edge on Maddening due to their ability to get Darting Blow from mastering Pegasus Knight.  You should strongly consider putting any female melee unit into that class fairly early to get the ability along with Death Blow.  And it's worthwhile to choose a F!Byleth to take advantage of this as well.

[Dark Holy Elf]

1 hour ago, SumG said:

Rally abilities are a necessity in the early game if you're going NG and not NG+.

This obviously isn't remotely true given that the Eagles don't have them (or at least, don't have the ones seen as most useful) and they survive NG Maddening just fine.

I personally don't find rallies that useful in this game, for reasons already stated. Milage may vary.

[Barren]

I think it depends on the situation. Rallies can be okay if you’re looking to better secure KOs or they may not make a difference.

[xigbar7]

Exploring early to build professor level fast results in more actual gameplay options in the long run since it equates to more battles when you decide to do so and you can remotivate more units when you want to train off focus skills. The sooner you have more activity points the more remaining chapters there are to use them. Also incidentally builds supports when you spend time on that and every bonus in combat you can get matters in maddening. 

[Shadow Mir]

19 hours ago, LoneStar said:

Getting all of those pretime skip paralogues done will take up most of you weekly battles when they come by. I tend to do exploration twice more often that battle twice, since you get 3 battles eventually and doing 6 battles in a month gets pretty tedious, and even 4 when you're not trying to knock out paralogues.

Speaking of paralogues, Hilda and Cyril's is the only pre-timeskip one that is still accessible in the post-timeskip phase of the game (if you have Cyril), so I wouldn't rush to clear that one.

Anyway, I would recommend Exploring a lot, while looking up the answer to the lecture questions. Also of note, at one point you get a study session right after finishing a chapter, so I'd recommend exploring right before that chapter's battle (iirc, it's chapter 7)

[SumG]

On 1/30/2021 at 5:10 PM, Dark Holy Elf said:

This obviously isn't remotely true given that the Eagles don't have them (or at least, don't have the ones seen as most useful) and they survive NG Maddening just fine.

I personally don't find rallies that useful in this game, for reasons already stated. Milage may vary.

BE do have some Rally abilities, albeit they aren't nearly as useful as the Rally abilities in the other Houses.  In particular, the lack of a unit with multiple Rally abilities like Ignatz or Annette hurts them.

But I'd argue the lack of rally abilities is one of the reasons BE has the hardest first few chapters out of the three houses.  Once you get into Intermediate classes they aren't particularly valuable anymore, but up to that point they can make a big difference.

[Dark Holy Elf]

8 hours ago, SumG said:

But I'd argue the lack of rally abilities is one of the reasons BE has the hardest first few chapters out of the three houses.  Once you get into Intermediate classes they aren't particularly valuable anymore, but up to that point they can make a big difference.

Can't say I agree with either the premise or the conclusion there! I never notice much difference between difficulty of the houses for the early maps. After doing/watching those early maps with highly limited rosters (as few as two people, and I know some people actually do solos) or other challenge runs, you're not going to convince me that the individual quality of the units (which are pretty balanced by most rankings) is going to have much impact on the challenge level.

[Anathaco]

14 hours ago, SumG said:

BE do have some Rally abilities, albeit they aren't nearly as useful as the Rally abilities in the other Houses.  In particular, the lack of a unit with multiple Rally abilities like Ignatz or Annette hurts them.

IMO at least, Dorothea's Rally Charm is just as useful as the rallybots you get in other houses. I don't know if people necessarily sleep on it, but it was a major carry in those first few chapters.

Anyway, to answer OP, the Golden Deer are definitely solid enough to use all in-house units, plus you get a few free slots to recruit a few more units of your choice. My personal preference is to focus on a few (say 5-6) good combat units and leave the rest as utility, be they healing, dancing, rallying or gambits. The latter is particularly notable, I often have units with high authority deployed specifically to use high level battalions with utility gambits like Blessing, Retribution or Dance of the Goddess. However using more or less than this number works just as well- see which units shape up for you and focus on them + anybody else you want to work on. As tricky as people make Maddening out to be, its pretty flexible overall in my experience, and any unit can work.

[Marco]

Let me impart some of my... er... "wisdom" if I may. For the love of all things holy, make sure you focus up on your house characters. You likely know which chapter I'm referring to when I say this, but if you neglected the characters that are a part of your house, you will have SERIOUSLY bad time. I was playing on casual like a pansy and I still thought I softlocked myself on that chapter. I managed to do some 4D chees to complete the chapter but only 1 unit was left standing so uhh... yeah. 

[wissenschaft]

Rally Charm is pretty powerful since it can make characters with low charm hit with their gambits. Normally its just linked gambits from your lord, Byleth that are accurate. Ignatz has another great use, his personal affects his gambits, hes another accurate blaze user. Blaze is amazing. Use blaze. One upside to  using a ground Byleth is they can use blaze accurately.

The best house for maddening is easily Golden Deer. Blue Lions does have a strong start but it has some meh units (Ashe, Mecedes not learning Physics in time for Ch2, the lack of warp). On the other hand, you can keep every unit in Golden Deer. They all work well on maddening. Even Lorenz, people over do the hate on him. You can have both Fire and Heal on Lorenz by chapters 3 and with enough instruction you can potentially have Frozen Lance by ch 4 but most certainly ch 5. Once you get Frozen Lance hes pretty damn good. Its a valid option to replace him with Slyvain but its not necessary. 

As for how to spend your time, meals. Eat meals for restoring motivation and building supports. Once your D+ professor rank you can spend 1 AP on Faculty Training. Once your C+ rank you can spend two AP on Faculty Training. Save bait for Fistful of Fish days if you ok with fish grind.  

Edited April 7, 2022 by wissenschaft

[5PointGordin]

I think doing aux battles is probably the best use of your time if you intend to use more than the class units in your playthrough, though ideally you have the DLC so you gain a decent amount of EXP from the aux battles. Nothing else you can do compares to aux battles because you get free EXP via yellow tiles, and a massive chunk of weapon & class exp, esp if you choose to abuse strats like putting a bishop / cleric on a forest tile and attacking them with broken / rusted weapons to get even more weapon exp. Purple tiles give you free training weapons so I don't really find money to ever be an issue either. I am playing through maddening for the first time on the blue lions route and I initially abused this strat to get stuff like double blow Ingrid, death blow on a ton of other units like Ash, fiendish blow on mages, training axe rank to reclass other units into brigand, etc.That being said, I recently discovered the infinite month glitch and think this is a way better method of grinding weapon ranks since it requires no set up and is more efficient on real world time. You can grind normal aux battles and low-man so you can gain class exp w/o overleveling.

Currently, I've finished chapter 9 and I am trying to train up 14 jacked fighters. If you don't have the DLC or use the infinite month glitch, you prob could still get by using this number, though you would need to hold off on some recruitments (I recruited Yuri & Hilda a bit earlier than I would like to). I've see others say to recruit out of house units later, but personally, I'm not so sure, since they will have a MASSIVE weapon rank and skill disadvantage if they join later.

I recommend picking up Constance since Bolting + double black tomefaire basically lets her snipe 4 units off of every map for free (sometimes more if her crest procs). I was able to clear Felixes paralogue in one turn by using stride and OHKOing the boss with Bolting. Her accuracy is bad though, so I reccommend giving her an accuracy ring.

Edited April 6, 2022 by 5PointGordin

[Bylift]

I, along with many who have posted here, had a verrrry hard time on Chapter 13 on my first maddening run due to ill preparation. Any time I do a NG run, I start thinking about Ch. 13 from day 1.

Here is what I like to do:

- use a flying class with your professor and grind if needed to get Alert Stance + before time skip (requires A+ flying; you might need to grind/cheese an aux battle or two)

- equip lances on professor, and get swordbreaker (B-rank, easy to do without grinding)

With swordbreaker (avo+20), AS+ (avo+30), and a bush (avo+20), you have a whopping +70 to your base avoid, or +80 with an evasion ring, or +95 with Jeralt's Mercenaries, and should be safe from those god awful pass thieves with insane stats and silver swords.

I have to say, strategizing for this map and getting through it without  a game over is one of the most satisfying parts of the game, and also one of the biggest hurdles to ANY maddening run, even NG+.

[wissenschaft]

8 hours ago, Bylift said:

I, along with many who have posted here, had a verrrry hard time on Chapter 13 on my first maddening run due to ill preparation. Any time I do a NG run, I start thinking about Ch. 13 from day 1.

Here is what I like to do:

- use a flying class with your professor and grind if needed to get Alert Stance + before time skip (requires A+ flying; you might need to grind/cheese an aux battle or two)

- equip lances on professor, and get swordbreaker (B-rank, easy to do without grinding)

With swordbreaker (avo+20), AS+ (avo+30), and a bush (avo+20), you have a whopping +70 to your base avoid, or +80 with an evasion ring, or +95 with Jeralt's Mercenaries, and should be safe from those god awful pass thieves with insane stats and silver swords.

I have to say, strategizing for this map and getting through it without  a game over is one of the most satisfying parts of the game, and also one of the biggest hurdles to ANY maddening run, even NG+.

AM Ch 13 is by far the hardest because you don't get either Felix or Slyvain on the left side to help out Byleth and Dimitri. For AM, your best bet really is a dodge F!Byleth with Alert Stance+. 

GD is by FAR the easiest version of the map. Claude starting as a flyer with a large AoE gambit trivializes the first group of enemies. Byleth doesn't matter as much on this route. He can be a ground based Grappler and used Blaze to help out. This map really wants you to use AoE Gambits. Hilda and Leonie coming in at the bottom left gives you two of your power houses. You'll want to make sure someone has impenetrable fortress gambit to making pulling groups of enemies easier. Frozen lance Lorenz can easily one shot a lot of those thiefs even with average growths in magic (Frozen lance is a pretty nuts combat art). Ignatz provides utility just by being another option for accurate Blaze use.

Basically, with GD is very easy to set up several gambit nukes for quickly wiping out groups of enemies in a turn or two. And because of the gambits lock enemy movement, it feels pretty safe as well. You don't have to worry about pass when the thieves are rattled.

Edited April 8, 2022 by wissenschaft

[Dark Holy Elf]

Getting Alert Stance+ by the timeskip feels very grindy to me. You can do it but it's not really necessary. A much less intensive, but equally important, skill to pick up for Byleth is Reposition, since it allows Byleth to safely move Dimitri out of the starting area without aggroing the entire southern group of foes. At that point, even a half-competent Dimitri and Byleth should be able to put in work, especially because Dimitri's Wave Attack is so darn potent (it's no Ashes and Dust, but it's still a better Blaze that can be used twice). Ashe as either a Wyvern or Sniper with Hunter's Volley (the latter probably needs a Knowledge Gem to have by now, or some grinding), make sure Mercedes (and Annette if she's in a magical class) have good staves like Thyrsus/Healing. Lightning Axe Wyvern Annette is also a solid option, it'll OHKO everything here the same way Frozen Lance does. I've had Ragnarok OHKOing everything on that map too, but it's less accurate against the Grapplers due to their Tomebreaker.

On 4/5/2022 at 3:08 PM, 5PointGordin said:

I've see others say to recruit out of house units later, but personally, I'm not so sure, since they will have a MASSIVE weapon rank and skill disadvantage if they join later.

There's little reason to recruit anyone later than Chapter 6 (given the option). In Chapter 6, they get a notable stat boost (in some cases, at least) due to getting the boosted growth rates from the (enemy versions of) the intermediate classes they have. Further stat growth boosts aren't nearly as significant, and the later you get, the more they miss out on valuable skills; the intermediate masteries are too good to delay. A further reason to recruit in Chapter 6 is your roster expands then; you get to use 10 units and the lord is unavailable.

[haarhaarhaar]

On 4/8/2022 at 5:29 AM, Dark Holy Elf said:

There's little reason to recruit anyone later than Chapter 6 (given the option). In Chapter 6, they get a notable stat boost (in some cases, at least) due to getting the boosted growth rates from the (enemy versions of) the intermediate classes they have. Further stat growth boosts aren't nearly as significant, and the later you get, the more they miss out on valuable skills; the intermediate masteries are too good to delay. A further reason to recruit in Chapter 6 is your roster expands then; you get to use 10 units and the lord is unavailable.

Maybe one exception to this is Anna? She can be recruited whenever, and her paralogue is in Part 2 for some routes, so while her recruitment class doesn't progress beyond Thief, her stats remain pretty parallel to your party (first time around, I recruited her at endgame, and her stats were better than at least half my army, although obviously without the setup they had). If you don't really want to use her much but want her paralogue rewards (which are fairly decent, but not required by any means), then the easiest way to have her not be dead weight is to recruit her a couple of weeks before you do her paralogue, and then class her into Assassin/Trickster if you want. 

[Dark Holy Elf]

1 hour ago, haarhaarhaar said:

Maybe one exception to this is Anna? She can be recruited whenever, and her paralogue is in Part 2 for some routes, so while her recruitment class doesn't progress beyond Thief, her stats remain pretty parallel to your party (first time around, I recruited her at endgame, and her stats were better than at least half my army, although obviously without the setup they had). If you don't really want to use her much but want her paralogue rewards (which are fairly decent, but not required by any means), then the easiest way to have her not be dead weight is to recruit her a couple of weeks before you do her paralogue, and then class her into Assassin/Trickster if you want. 

Yeah that's a fair point. And in fact in general, "right before doing their paralogue" is often the best time to recruit people if you plan to use them for their paralogue and never again.

[Barren]

I’ve done the same thing on my Azure moon run. Made her an assassin since she was already at level 21 and was very close to sword rank B. Her bow was already at C+ I think so making her an Assassin with Axebreaker was very easy and she at least baited in Warriors well enough.

[Graveless]

It's tricky for many characters in NG, but unlocking Armor Knight and then never using it can be a godsend for making certain characters capable of surviving counter strikes(Lysithea) or hilariously powerful mix-phase fighters(Ingrid, Annette, and Petra) for quite some time because they'll often get +4 to +6 defense out of it. 

In particular, anyone you're having work on Axes can get there with a small amount of time spent on leveling armor and eventually get the - weight skill later on when you have the spare time to focus it again.