Dread Fighter Mozu

[LukeB]

I am a fairly new Fire Emblem player. FE3H was the first fire emblem I've ever beaten, and now I am working my way back through the catalog. I beat Echoes, and now I just started Fates.

My general approach has been to do good amount of looking into units, and then having my first playthrough be on the hardest difficulty. I beat FE3H Maddening with Blue Lions, then I beat Echoes Hard mode. Now I have started a Lunatic Fates run. After reading up on the units, I decided that I wanted to have Mozu on my team, despite the plentiful posts saying you should just bench her.  (I liked the villagers training up to be on par with knights from Echoes.  Kliff and Faye were two of my best units on that run). I read that making her a dread fighter was her best bet, but even on those posts I saw multiple people commenting that you should just bench her. 

I just finished her Paralogue, and I must say that she caught up way faster then the internet led me to believe.  Looking over her stats, I think that she is already my best unit?

• She is tied for the highest strength in my army (with Corrin)
• She has the second highest speed in my army (1 less then Kaze, but higher then every other unit)
• She is in a 4 way tie for first place in Defense
• She has the highest Res in my army

And with Aptitude, I think she has the highest growths in all of those stats as well, so she should out pace everyone moving forward. I babied her for like half of 1 paralogue, and that was all it took for her to become my best unit. 

Why do people still say bench her? (I guess I have not seen how long it takes for her to come off the ground if you immediately make her an archer as opposed to dread fighter, but I was seeing people advise benching her on posts specifically about making her a dread fighter. 

[Imuabicus der Fertige]

I like Mozu, she´s one of my favourite units but there are some things here to consider.

1. Dread Fighter. It is a really good class, but most importantly it counts as a promoted class which means reclassing into it should give just about anyone a good all-around stat boost.

2. Most of what I´ve seen against Mozu, brought forth in a reasonable fashion argues with a loose "efficiency" in mind as well as just Ltc-ing in general. Obviously using Mozu in an Ltc run is not sensible. As for efficiency... eh? I can´t judge that, since enemies are just bags of exp.

3. The Investment argument. Normally, when talking about Mozu, what people mean is reclassing her to Archer. That does require you to buy at minimum a Bronze Bow, seeing as chapter 9 boss gives you a HS. However, at that point you could also reclass Corrin to another class, Jakob, maybe even Felicia, you probably get the gist of it and have Corrin follow whatever classline you want and maybe enjoy the benefits of a reclassed Servant 1.  Additionally, you could give the exp from her paralogue to another unit.

4. Trolling, I suspect.

I think that covers it?

[Sooks]

People say to bench her because they don’t think she’s worth it because of all the exp she takes to use, which you could spend on using other units.

I actually think she’s worth using on high difficulties anyway, because Conquest imo doesn’t really give you anyone that good. Like other than her you get Camilla, and some OP children. I prefer spending a bunch of exp to get a god then using it to make my alright units slightly better all around, since really all you need to get her online is her paralogue which is but one map. I think it just comes down to your preference.

2 hours ago, LukeB said:

I am a fairly new Fire Emblem player. FE3H was the first fire emblem I've ever beaten,

I beat FE3H Maddening with Blue Lions,

I’m sorry, what?? Your first ever play through was Three Houses maddening? And you didn’t get softlocked at 13 and made it to the end? Is that the implication here..?

That’s not an easy feat. Oh and I didn’t mean to sound accusatory here, good job. 3H was my second game and I had to lower the difficulty from hard. I mean, I didn’t research into who’s good and how to use them, but still.

2 hours ago, LukeB said:

Now I have started a Lunatic Fates run.

Good luck...

Quote

I read that making her a dread fighter was her best bet, but even on those posts I saw multiple people commenting that you should just bench her. 

I mean it is her best bet, but imo that’s kind of a waste of a dread scroll, a trained up Mozu destroys anything either way.

Quote

 

• She is tied for the highest strength in my army (with Corrin)
• She has the second highest speed in my army (1 less then Kaze, but higher then every other unit)
• She is in a 4 way tie for first place in Defense
• She has the highest Res in my army

Yes, she has wonderful growths and does get online quickly (imo?).

Her speed growth as a dread fighter is 80 so that’s expected. In fact, as a dread fighter her only growth that isn’t 50 or above is magic (and if your Mozu is using magic you’re not using her in the best way) so this is pretty standard.

Quote

And with Aptitude, I think she has the highest growths in all of those stats as well, so she should out pace everyone moving forward. I babied her for like half of 1 paralogue, and that was all it took for her to become my best unit. 

Yep, that’s her unit archetype. She starts getting one rounded by everyone but grows better than like every other unit. Quite a few Fire Emblems have these, although imo Mozu is the best at it unless you count like all of Three Houses hit that’s not really fair.

Edited April 20, 2021 by Sooks
Factored in aptitude.

[eclipse]

Can you post Mozu's stats, as well as any reclasses, and when those reclasses happened?  FE is a numbers game at heart, so it's fairly easy to tell if you're getting lucky with your levels, or if everyone else is getting screwed.

[Imuabicus der Fertige]

12 minutes ago, Sooks said:

Yes, she has wonderful growths and does get online quickly (imo?).

Her speed growth as a dread fighter is 70, so that’s expected. Her strength, skill and res are also above 50.

Her defense is only 40 though, which, iirc, isn’t that high for this game. Especially with Effie.

You forgot to add Aptitude. +10% to all growths.

Effie as a Knight has 55% and DF Mozu would have 50% DEF growth.

[Sooks]

15 minutes ago, Imuabicus said:

You forgot to add Aptitude. +10% to all growths.

Effie as a Knight has 55% and DF Mozu would have 50% DEF growth.

Oops. I’ll edit that, thank you.

[Shadow Mir]

1 hour ago, LukeB said:

I am a fairly new Fire Emblem player. FE3H was the first fire emblem I've ever beaten, and now I am working my way back through the catalog. I beat Echoes, and now I just started Fates.

My general approach has been to do good amount of looking into units, and then having my first playthrough be on the hardest difficulty. I beat FE3H Maddening with Blue Lions, then I beat Echoes Hard mode. Now I have started a Lunatic Fates run. After reading up on the units, I decided that I wanted to have Mozu on my team, despite the plentiful posts saying you should just bench her.  (I liked the villagers training up to be on par with knights from Echoes.  Kliff and Faye were two of my best units on that run). I read that making her a dread fighter was her best bet, but even on those posts I saw multiple people commenting that you should just bench her. 

I just finished her Paralogue, and I must say that she caught up way faster then the internet led me to believe.  Looking over her stats, I think that she is already my best unit?

• She is tied for the highest strength in my army (with Corrin)
• She has the second highest speed in my army (1 less then Kaze, but higher then every other unit)
• She is in a 4 way tie for first place in Defense
• She has the highest Res in my army

And with Aptitude, I think she has the highest growths in all of those stats as well, so she should out pace everyone moving forward. I babied her for like half of 1 paralogue, and that was all it took for her to become my best unit. 

Why do people still say bench her? (I guess I have not seen how long it takes for her to come off the ground if you immediately make her an archer as opposed to dread fighter, but I was seeing people advise benching her on posts specifically about making her a dread fighter. 

Hold the phone. Are you saying you did NOT get locked by chapter 13 in 3H? I get this sneaking suspicion you're lying...

Anyway, the issue with Mozu is that she starts well behind everyone else. And while she CAN be good, the fact that you have to go so far as to slow down to a crawl and feed most of her paralogue to her (at least, that's what most of her defenders are in support of) is NOT the mark of a worthwhile unit imho. Someone that's worthwhile shouldn't start behind everyone else and require me to shaft everyone else for their sake. 

[eclipse]

26 minutes ago, Shadow Mir said:

Hold the phone. Are you saying you did NOT get locked by chapter 13 in 3H? I get this sneaking suspicion you're lying...

OP admits to doing research beforehand.  This isn't me doing my usual SRW shenanigans with a wing and a prayer.  Also, it isn't good form to outright accuse someone of lying without doing some questioning first.

[Shadow Mir]

6 minutes ago, eclipse said:

OP admits to doing research beforehand.  This isn't me doing my usual SRW shenanigans with a wing and a prayer.  Also, it isn't good form to outright accuse someone of lying without doing some questioning first.

Guess you're right. Either way, I get the feeling the OP is either extremely gutsy, extremely masochistic, or both... But now that I think about it... Maybe the OP here is the friend that @Hasechihad mentioned in another thread.

[SnowFire]

As others have noted, I'm not really sure the game is balanced around Dread Scrolls.  They're DLC for-fun nostalgia options, with Dread Fighter a callback for FE2 fans and the Grandmaster's Seal a callback for Awakening fans and so on.  So most characters will be good in them.  That said, for Mozu's worth specifically...

...for why people hate on Mozu: Because people are wrong?  To vastly oversimplify, there's two schools of Fire Emblem player: the "focus on long-term potential above all else" type that used to be predominant ("FE7 Marcus is an XP thief, pre promoted units are bad") and "This game is easy after 8 playthroughs so I rank by LTC stratz" ("Warp/Rescue are the best thing ever, prepromos rule, growth units suck").  Both schools have a point, but very loosely, games which feature tough endgames and few Athos-style crutches reward the "focus on growth" characters, while games that feature tough earlygames and have powerful late-joiners favor the "eh just use bases and good-now" characters.  And, well, Conquest is the former: its endgame chapters are absolutely brutal, and you don't have any Caineghis style broken late-joiner to carry you in the last chapters.  So Mozu, a character that starts weak and gets very strong, is absolutely in her element.  (Camilla & Xander are broken too but that's because they also have great growths to go with their great start, which is why they're just ludicrously good.)  The people you read hating on Mozu are all in the LTC camp, and, well, they're right that you can beat Conquest in fewer turns by not bothering with Mozu.  The bigger concern is that non-royal Conquest unit balance is still pretty solid... a built Mozu ultimately isn't THAT much better than built competition, at least compared to some of the earlier games in the series where a built FE6 Shanna just trashes FE6 Juno in every stat.  So it can be argued that the payoff isn't as high.  It still exists, though!

Not relevant for your point since you used a DLC promotion item, but I personally don't think investing an early Heart Seal for no- Path Reward/  DLC runs is a big deal though.  If you're using Mozu it's obviously worth it to get into a non-Villager class like Archer.  But I haven't ever tried the "Heart Seal an early Jakob into a Paladin" that some people hype up, so who knows.

EDIT: Per LoneStar below, I guess you didn't say whether this was Conquest or Birthright?  Perversely enough, I do think Mozu is weaker on Birthright.  Catch-up XP is very strong in Fates so adding grinding doesn't help as much as you might think, and Birthright is easier such that babying a growth unit is just less rewarding - the final chapters aren't punishing enough to really reward Mozu's good final stats, Corrin / Your Favorite Ninja / Ryoma / Your Favorite Staff Unit can still wreck most enemies.  Plus you have more archery competition in Birthright - in CQ, it's Niles or Mozu or DLC Anna, or something like Bow Knight Selena I guess, but Mozu's niche is harder to replicate.  In BR, Takumi exists, so eh.

Edited April 20, 2021 by SnowFire

[LoneStar]

I'm guessing you lurked around other areas and saw people hating on Mozu. Like others have said it's probably some Low Turn Count or SpeedRun stuff that people do. In those context the time that you need to train Mozu will obviously hurt playing through the game fast, but she's a unit with high growths so she will be worth while in the long run if you don't mind investing.

It's good to read up on other opinions, but be wary of the context. I've watched a few LTC and speed runs, but I don't care to do them myself. If I want to take the 20 or so turns to milk Mozu's paralogue to get her to a good level and have an amazing unit at the end, so be it.

It sounds like you're playing Birthright, which shouldn't be too bad. I would give you big props for going into Conquest Lunatic as a first run.

[LukeB]

3 hours ago, Sooks said:

I’m sorry, what?? Your first ever play through was Three Houses maddening? And you didn’t get softlocked at 13 and made it to the end? Is that the implication here..?

That’s not an easy feat. Oh and I didn’t mean to sound accusatory here, good job. 3H was my second game and I had to lower the difficulty from hard. I mean, I didn’t research into who’s good and how to use them, but still.

Yeah, I really thought I was soft locked on that chapter for a while. It took many, many attempts to find a way out of the starting position. It actually ended up being Annette that saved me. I tried every thing I could think of to get out of the starting positions using Byleth+Dimitri, but could not find a way to keep them alive.

I finally gave up on them, and decided to give Mercedes+Annette an attempt at making any progress.  I was running Annette as a bolt axe/lighting axe unit on a horse (not sure right now what class she was in at the time, but at the end  of the game she was a great knight lol) and Mercedes happened to have Stride on her. So I was able to use stride on Annette, send her out to one shot a single enemy using lightning axe, and then retreat back to her starting position thanks to canto/the extra move from stride. Then I repeated that again the following turn. Then, with 2 enemies down, Byleth and Dimitri were able to safely start moving forward without getting overwhelmed. Once the four of them (and my dancer Ashe+Gilbert) were able to join up, the rest of the level was pretty easy. But I definitely tried moving Byleth and Dimitri on to every combination of tiles I could think of before I found a way out lol

I did not know to properly prepare for that chapter, but I think I was lucky that I was mainly using Blue Lions Characters / minimal recruits (because I originally planned to play all of the houses, but ended up on Echoes instead). And I am lucky that some random reddit user raved over how good lightning axe Annette was lol

[LukeB]

3 hours ago, Sooks said:

I mean it is her best bet, but imo that’s kind of a waste of a dread scroll, a trained up Mozu destroys anything either way.

Who would it be better to use the dread scroll on? I am playing birthright. I have heard that Azama does well with one, but I have two, and I did not have a plan for it to go to anyone else anyways haha

[eclipse]

And lastly, don't post twice in a row.  Either do some Quote button abuse or use Multiquote.

[Sooks]

30 minutes ago, LukeB said:

Who would it be better to use the dread scroll on? I am playing birthright. I have heard that Azama does well with one, but I have two, and I did not have a plan for it to go to anyone else anyways haha

Oh I did dreadfighter Azama my first play through and he destroyed the game.

I can’t speak to Lunatic mode though. I just meant to say that Mozu is already so good that a dread scroll could do better on someone else, but Azama should definitely get one.

[Shadow Mir]

1 hour ago, LukeB said:

Who would it be better to use the dread scroll on? I am playing birthright. I have heard that Azama does well with one, but I have two, and I did not have a plan for it to go to anyone else anyways haha

In general, anyone who uses swords, axes or shurikens is a good candidate.

Also, imho, Mozu is not really worth it on Birthright because Takumi exists.

1 hour ago, LukeB said:

Yeah, I really thought I was soft locked on that chapter for a while. It took many, many attempts to find a way out of the starting position. It actually ended up being Annette that saved me. I tried every thing I could think of to get out of the starting positions using Byleth+Dimitri, but could not find a way to keep them alive.

I finally gave up on them, and decided to give Mercedes+Annette an attempt at making any progress.  I was running Annette as a bolt axe/lighting axe unit on a horse (not sure right now what class she was in at the time, but at the end  of the game she was a great knight lol) and Mercedes happened to have Stride on her. So I was able to use stride on Annette, send her out to one shot a single enemy using lightning axe, and then retreat back to her starting position thanks to canto/the extra move from stride. Then I repeated that again the following turn. Then, with 2 enemies down, Byleth and Dimitri were able to safely start moving forward without getting overwhelmed. Once the four of them (and my dancer Ashe+Gilbert) were able to join up, the rest of the level was pretty easy. But I definitely tried moving Byleth and Dimitri on to every combination of tiles I could think of before I found a way out lol

I did not know to properly prepare for that chapter, but I think I was lucky that I was mainly using Blue Lions Characters / minimal recruits (because I originally planned to play all of the houses, but ended up on Echoes instead). And I am lucky that some random reddit user raved over how good lightning axe Annette was lol

Nice to get an explanation, because I was seriously doubting that you could've gone straight to Maddening on your first run and NOT gotten locked by chapter 13.

Edited April 20, 2021 by Shadow Mir

[Hasechi]

13 hours ago, Shadow Mir said:

Maybe the OP here is the friend that @Hasechihad mentioned in another thread.

What do you mean....? Also what does OP mean?..

Edited April 21, 2021 by Hasechi

[Sooks]

5 hours ago, Hasechi said:

What do you mean....? Also what does OP mean?..

It stands for Original Poster. It means the person who started the topic/who made the first post.

Edited April 21, 2021 by Sooks

[Hasechi]

37 minutes ago, Sooks said:

It stand for Original Poster. It means the person who started the topic/who made the first post.

thanks.I thought OP It stand for Opening. lol

 

Edited April 21, 2021 by Hasechi

[Hasechi]

"OP admits to doing research beforehand." 

why after "to" is "doing"?  I thought after to always be a bare verb

[LukeB]

8 hours ago, Hasechi said:

"OP admits to doing research beforehand." 

why after "to" is "doing"?  I thought after to always be a bare verb

The work "to" has two common uses in English. It can be the start of an infinitive verb, which is written as "to" + a verb (to run, to do, ect), but it can also be a preposition, which is written as "to" + noun (he went to the store)

In this sentence, they were not making an infinite verb, they were making  prepositional phrase. The verb of the sentence is "admits"  and "to doing" is a prepositional phrase/direct object of the sentence. Prepositional phrases require a noun, and "doing" is the noun form of to do.

[Hasechi]

@LukeB thank man! I understand now.

I really like that you blind playthrough in hardest difficulty. I have a friend that always do that too. And I really admire player like you:

- Patiently & calmly solve the problem on your own.

- Very smart & brave to able to do that and become much more. 

- Train the spirit that never give up on hard situations

[LukeB]

34 minutes ago, Hasechi said:

@LukeB thank man! I understand now.

I really like that you blind playthrough in hardest difficulty. I have a friend that always do that too. And I really admire player like you:

- Patiently & calmly solve the problem on your own.

- Very smart & brave to able to do that and become much more. 

- Train the spirit that never give up on hard situations

No problem!

I have to admit, that while I have been starting each game on the hardest difficulty, I have not been doing blind play throughs. I spend a good amount of time looking at character stats here on Serenes, and looking at class suggestions/tier lists on here / reddit / occasionally youtube. I don't look up guides on how to beat levels, but I am also not going in blind haha.

 

I mainly  don't enjoy replaying games (which is why I did not end up doing the other houses in Three Houses, the second run I started was too much like same run that I had just beaten), but do like beating difficult games, so I play on the most difficult setting after looking up enough information to think I have a shot at doing it. 

[Hasechi]

@LukeBthat semi-blind. Im a bit like you. I dont want to watch again a story I've already known.

[Shadow Mir]

13 hours ago, LukeB said:

I mainly  don't enjoy replaying games (which is why I did not end up doing the other houses in Three Houses, the second run I started was too much like same run that I had just beaten), but do like beating difficult games, so I play on the most difficult setting after looking up enough information to think I have a shot at doing it. 

This makes me ask, what if the game you're playing requires being beaten beforehand to unlock the hardest difficulty? Also, personally, if a game DOESN'T make me want to replay it, something's wrong.