Are wrath/critical hit sets overrated?

[Barren]

I have a curious question for those who have beaten this game on maddening or any of the earlier entries on the series on their lunatic difficulty. Are critical hit set ups overrated? I ask this because it seems to be an easy way out for those otherwise really difficult chapter battles.

For example Claude can go Alert Stance+ and Battalion Wrath as a Barbarossa or Wyvern Lord and just score a crit with a forged Killer Blow after dodging an attack with retribution activated. Dimitri has the B. Vantage + B. Wrath set and we all know about that. Edelgard does not have access to B. Wrath. Just regular vantage + wrath+ defiant crit which everyone else can do.

I recently beat crimson flower maddening using El as a WL with a defiant crit set. My goal was to have her score a string of critical hits while her HP being dangerously low against The Immaculate One using Raging Storm. It didn’t exactly work out because of her crest of flames activating and restoring her HP but it did bring her down to her last health bar before it broke.

Makes me wonder if maddening can be beat without resorting to dedicated crit sets. I’m sure it probably can be beaten but does it make it harder to beat without crit sets or is it necessary anyways because of how difficult maddening can be by the end game?

[lenticular]

For my money, I'd say that enemy-phase sweepers using Wrath and Defiant Crit are over-rated, yes. There are basically two ways that you can set them up and both of them have problems.

The first option is to combine with Vantage and Retribution (or the Chalice of Beginning), with the idea being that whenever you're attacked, you hit first and kill them before they can kill you. This works well enough against most enemies, but I've found that Three Houses has too many things that counter it for it to work consistently. Gambits can still hit you, so can siege weapons, so can monsters that you can't take down in one hit (especially those with barriers that prevent crits). And if you're running a low-health build, inconsistency leads to death. It's good when it works, but you have to be careful when you deploy it.

The other option is to combine it with a dodge tank build. That way, nothing will ever hit you, you don't need to worry about being at low health, you kill everything, you win. Yay. Except that you can also do exactly the same thing with a dodge tank that isn't running a high crit build. Once you have a reliable dodge tank, you've already won the game and everything else is just for show. It's probably going to be quicker and flashier if you're one-shotting everything with crits, but not particularly more effective.

I do think that Dimitri's Battalion Vantage/Battalion Wrath combo is strong, though. Not being at low health means that it doesn't care about taking the occasional hit from the things that can break through the build, and not requiring a working dodge tank chassis means that it isn't just a win more combo.

Player-phase crit builds are fun and can work well, but they're limited by being player-phase builds. No matter how good they are, they're only killing one enemy per turn (excepting Dance, Raging Storm, etc.) and there are no shortage of builds that can get reliable player-phase kills. 

53 minutes ago, Barren said:

Makes me wonder if maddening can be beat without resorting to dedicated crit sets. I’m sure it probably can be beaten but does it make it harder to beat without crit sets or is it necessary anyways because of how difficult maddening can be by the end game?

Can confirm that, yes, it is possible to beat Maddening without dedicated crit builds.

[windypanda1]

I've cleared Maddening 5 times and I personally think the crit builds are not worth all of the skill grinding and setup you have to do, with 1 exception which is Dimitri. Dimitri has both Battalion Vantage and Battalion Wrath which is a unique combination that no one else has. This means he can 100% crit enemies to death before they can even touch him, which makes dealing with enemy hordes very easy. This build is hilariously busted with Chalice of Beginnings, or you can use Retribution Gambit to set it up.

 

On 1/7/2022 at 11:26 PM, lenticular said:

The other option is to combine it with a dodge tank build. That way, nothing will ever hit you, you don't need to worry about being at low health, you kill everything, you win. Yay. Except that you can also do exactly the same thing with a dodge tank that isn't running a high crit build. Once you have a reliable dodge tank, you've already won the game and everything else is just for show. It's probably going to be quicker and flashier if you're one-shotting everything with crits, but not particularly more effective.

You've piqued my interest. Is dodgetanking even possible outside of like, Alert Stance+ Falcon Knight Byleth? You'd need some ridiculous stats to reach a state where maddening enemies can't even hit you. It wouldn't be very difficult to pull off in Hard Difficulty however.

On 1/7/2022 at 11:26 PM, lenticular said:

Player-phase crit builds are fun and can work well, but they're limited by being player-phase builds. No matter how good they are, they're only killing one enemy per turn (excepting Dance, Raging Storm, etc.) and there are no shortage of builds that can get reliable player-phase kills. 

I think killing one thing reliably in player-phase is pretty good for Maddening standards since only a few units/builds can even reliably enemy phase anyways. You're totally right that there are no shortage of builds that can accomplish this without any crit setup though. 

 

Edit:

After 6 months and 4 more playthroughs, I can indeed confirm dodgetanking is broken in this game lol. 

Edited June 4, 2022 by windypanda1

[Barren]

7 minutes ago, windypanda1 said:

I've cleared Maddening 5 times and I personally think the crit builds are not worth all of the skill grinding and setup you have to do, with 1 exception which is Dimitri. Dimitri has both Battalion Vantage and Battalion Wrath which is a unique combination that no one else has. This means he can 100% crit enemies to death before they can even touch him, which makes dealing with enemy hordes very easy. This build is hilariously busted with Chalice of Beginnings, or you can use Retribution Gambit to set it up.

You've piqued my interest. Is dodgetanking even possible outside of like, Alert Stance+ Falcon Knight Byleth? You'd need some ridiculous stats to reach a state where maddening enemies can't even hit you. It wouldn't be very hard in Hard Difficulty however.

I have used Dimitri’s B.Vantage + B.Wrath set. And I can gladly say that it was a god send. Particularly during the Anna Paralogue where he absolutely cleared out nearly everyone since that was a pain in the neck.

Falcon Knight Byleth is also quite good on maddening. I used a defiant avoid built where nearly everything had like 1% chance to hit me after factoring in alert stance+ and an evasion ring with the Cichol Wyvern Co. battalion.

[windypanda1]

10 minutes ago, Barren said:

I have used Dimitri’s B.Vantage + B.Wrath set. And I can gladly say that it was a god send. Particularly during the Anna Paralogue where he absolutely cleared out nearly everyone since that was a pain in the neck.

Falcon Knight Byleth is also quite good on maddening. I used a defiant avoid built where nearly everything had like 1% chance to hit me after factoring in alert stance+ and an evasion ring with the Cichol Wyvern Co. battalion.

Yeah Falcon Byleth is no joke. I stuck with Enlightened One for the longest time until I actually tried using Falcon Knight, and it was so much more powerful. She basically curbstomped half of the game.

[Imuabicus der Fertige]

18 minutes ago, windypanda1 said:

Is dodgetanking even possible outside of like,

Everone who can get Alert Stance/+ can dodgetank; the naturally faster the unit the better the dodgetank. Then there´s stuff like Ferdinands/Dmitri personal skill, Dancer SwordAvoid setups exist methinks, further enhancing dodginess.

I had little trouble with either of Hegemon Edelgards forms, thanks to having Alert Stance+ on Dmitri and Hapi thus not having to worry about her long range shenanigans.

To add to what Barren said, weapon proficeny also plays a considerable role, both in Avoid and Crit. 

1 hour ago, Barren said:

Makes me wonder if maddening can be beat without resorting to dedicated crit sets. I’m sure it probably can be beaten but does it make it harder to beat without crit sets or is it necessary anyways because of how difficult maddening can be by the end game?

Depends - do you count a Hunters Volley Sniper as a dedicated crit build?

[Barren]

4 minutes ago, Imuabicus said:

Depends - do you count a Hunters Volley Sniper as a dedicated crit build?

I guess you could say I would. But from my experience I typically don’t really need a HV spammer to have a crit set unless it’s against monsters and monster bosses. For the most part a dedicated crit sniper with HV tends to be overkill for me. I mean I have KO’d most enemies without needing any additional crit than what the combat art provides. 

[Shadow Mir]

Honestly, I'd say yes. Battalion Vantage + Battalion Wrath has the advantage of not needing to be at low health, so that's ten billion percent safer, but regular wrath setups are too inconsistent. And if you opt for Defiant Crit, you're significantly increasing the risk factor for in case you run into anything that can foil it (and that's disregarding the fact that Defiant Crit is tied to mastering a Master tier class, which means you might not even get much time to use it).

Edited January 7, 2022 by Shadow Mir

[windypanda1]

10 minutes ago, Imuabicus said:

Everone who can get Alert Stance/+ can dodgetank; the naturally faster the unit the better the dodgetank. Then there´s stuff like Ferdinands/Dmitri personal skill, Dancer SwordAvoid setups exist methinks, further enhancing dodginess.

I had little trouble with either of Hegemon Edelgards forms, thanks to having Alert Stance+ on Dmitri and Hapi thus not having to worry about her long range shenanigans.

To add to what Barren said, weapon proficeny also plays a considerable role, both in Avoid and Crit. 

Depends - do you count a Hunters Volley Sniper as a dedicated crit build?

Interesting! I still don't think EVERYONE could pull it off effectively, but there are definitely ways to get more avoid in the game through certain skills and personals. I'll have to try making a dodgetank-based team in a future playthrough. 

[lenticular]

49 minutes ago, windypanda1 said:

You've piqued my interest. Is dodgetanking even possible outside of like, Alert Stance+ Falcon Knight Byleth? You'd need some ridiculous stats to reach a state where maddening enemies can't even hit you. It wouldn't be very difficult to pull off in Hard Difficulty however.

There are lots of different sources of Avoid in Three Houses and it's a simple matter to stack them. You can get Avoid from: your speed stat, your weapon prowess, being in a flying class, Alert Stance+, [weapon] Avoid +20 abilities, Ferdinand and Dimitri's personal abilities, your battalion, an Evasion Ring, Defiant Avoid. Getting to the point where it is literally impossible to be hit by anything requires some work, but getting to the point where you can practically be confident that you won't die is pretty easy.

A fairly low effort, non-optimised dodge tank might be something like Falcon Knight (10) Ingrid with 35 speed (+35), Lance Prowess Lvl 5 (+15), Galatea Pegasus Co (+10) and an Evasion Ring (+10) using Alert Stance+ (+30) for a total of 110 avoid. Which is good enough for a lot of purposes. And if you want to go beyond that then you absolutely can.

[SumG]

1 hour ago, windypanda1 said:

Is dodgetanking even possible outside of like, Alert Stance+ Falcon Knight Byleth? You'd need some ridiculous stats to reach a state where maddening enemies can't even hit you. It wouldn't be very difficult to pull off in Hard Difficulty however.

I tend to lean heavily on dodgetank builds when I play Maddening.  In fact, I've never bothered with the crit-centric builds since they seem so fiddly to me (not to say they can't work, they just don't interest me).  By the endgame, most enemies tend to have hit percentages against my units in the 10-30% range, which means they are only sparingly going to be hit.  And while I do prioritize evasion to an extent, there is certainly room to improve that number even more if you wanted to go all-in.  If you're using the fastest units in the game (Felix, Petra, Ingrid, Leonie, and maybe Byleth) using lightweight weapons, then most enemies will only get one attack on you per combat which will help keep you safe.

One thing to bear in mind that helps a great deal is not only utilizing the X-breaker abilities, but also making sure that you have access to all of the X-breaker of the primary weapon triangle types in your party.  Ideally, you'll want at least a Wyvern Rider/Lord with Lancebreaker, a Falcon Knight with Swordbreaker, and another unit with Axebreaker, likely either an Assassin or a sword-wielding Falcon Knight.  (Note: Byleth serves really well as a sword wielding Falcon Knight, since they have much better strength than the average unit, and so can afford to lose the class's innate lancefaire, and you still get to use the Sword of the Creator.)  The dodgetanks function well against units they have weapon triangle advantage over, good against neutral weapons (including bows, gauntlets, and tomes), and tolerable against weapons going against the weapon triangle.  That's why you need to find a good sword unit to dodgetank, so you have someone that can handle enemy Wyverns.

You make sure to equip X-breaker abilities, Weapon Prowess, Alert Stance+.  You choose a battalion that has good evasion support (which is easy, since you don't have many options for flying battalions and many have them do help on this front).  Some people like to use an Evasion Ring as an accessory, but I prefer items that prevent bonus damage against fliers.  

[windypanda1]

It’s definitely a good strategy especially with how many divine pulses the game gives you in case you actually get horrible RNG. I’ve always played FE in a heavy player-phase way since I find it more fun than throwing units at a pile of enemies, but it’s interesting to know there are ways to trivialize even the infamous Maddening by avoid stacking. It seems like I’ve accidentally changed the topic to dodgetank builds rather than crit builds, sorry about that.

Edited January 8, 2022 by windypanda1

[Barren]

2 hours ago, windypanda1 said:

It’s definitely a good strategy especially with how many divine pulses the game gives you in case you actually get horrible RNG. I’ve always played FE in a heavy player-phase way since I find it more fun than throwing units at a pile of enemies, but it’s interesting to know there are ways to trivialize even the infamous Maddening by avoid stacking. It seems like I’ve accidentally changed the topic to dodgetank builds rather than crit builds, sorry about that.

 No worries. Topics tend to derail on a forum like this anyways. But back to the topic on hand. When I tackled maddening for the first time, I did Golden Deer and ran a Battalion Wrath set with Claude. It’s reliable because I wouldn’t have to worry about whether or not his crest (which restores HP) would activate.

But if I were to ever revisit this (which may not be for a long time because I want to finish Silver Snow and put the game down for a while), I want to try something different for a non dedicated crit set. Same with Dimitri though I do admit I loved his b. vantage + b. wrath set since I feel these two are capable enough to run a different kind of set up.

El having defiant crit I was met with mixed results as I mentioned before. Even though El is excellent on maddening too thanks to Raging Storm, it would seem that you just have to pray for her crest of flames not activating in order for her crit string to not be broken. Of course it was in a way a good thing that it did proc because I had 0 divine pulses left when I tried the strategy against The Immaculate One. Chapter 18 was the toughest fight for me yet. And god only knows when the Silver Snow final boss for me will probably top it.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Most of my opinion on this has already been stated eloquently by lenticular.

Vantage/Wrath: It's.... okay but has a bunch of holes. You have to watch out for all the things that might make it go wrong. Additionally, I'm not a fan of spending large amounts of time in mediocre, low-move classes, which these builds require (Mercenary or Hero for Vantage, Warrior for Wrath).

Dodgetank/B-Wrath: If you're building a dodgetank anyway, and they learn this, it's not a bad idea to stack them, although you are probably giving up a good skill to do it. But it really is kinda win-more; if you have a unit who can consistently bait enemies like this, you're looking good. Additionally, not having Wrath or B-Wrath just means you kill 50% of enemies (while injuring the rest) instead of 100% and that's already pretty good!

B-Wrath/B-Vantage: Actually good because it isn't just win-more (the skills stack to protect Dimitri) and doesn't require putting him in greater danger than you would otherwise, since he can still run around at full HP (and with his high charm and evasion he's well-set up to deal with anything that does hit him).

Vantage/B-Wrath: I've occasionally seen people hype this and I found it truly terrible. Basically every problem of the Vantage/Wrath set, except hey you don't have to master Warrior. But, compounding this is the battalion HP management; the setup requires you deliberately take damage to activate it, forcing you to rotate battalions every couple fights or so since there's a relatively small window between "red battalion" and "retreated battalion". The build can be made to work, but it definitely to me feels like a way more complicated and finnicky way to win than the many ways the game already provides, and I don't think highly of such things.

As for player phase crit builds... well, Hunter's Volley is definitely a legitimate one. Of course, the neat thing about Hunter's Volley is you don't need criticals for many enemies, and when you do, it's a simple matter to switch to a Killer Bow+ instead of some other choice. Also it's a very safe criticial build; if you fail to crit, chances are you still avoided a counter. I'm not really a fan of other critical builds (using swords or gauntlets) because failure to crit can often be messy. The enemy types most likely to need crits to take out are monsters and war masters, in my experience; the latter tends to kill you if you attack at melee and don't kill first, some of the former can too, if you haven't broken them first.

On 1/7/2022 at 6:56 AM, windypanda1 said:

You've piqued my interest. Is dodgetanking even possible outside of like, Alert Stance+ Falcon Knight Byleth? You'd need some ridiculous stats to reach a state where maddening enemies can't even hit you. It wouldn't be very difficult to pull off in Hard Difficulty however.

Byleth isn't even the best person for it (though can be one): Dimitri and Ferdinand have personals which boost evade, Petra/Ingrid/Claude have flying talent to get Alert Stance+ more quickly, and even Leonie/Catherine are faster (which translates into a bit more evade).

Generally speaking the idea is to stack many things which boost evasion (and charm to help ward off gambits)... Maddening doesn't actually boost enemy accuracy that much (because it raises all stats by roughly comparable amounts and dex just doesn't have a very pronounced effect on Hit). So if anything dodgetanking is relatively most effective on Maddening (on lower difficulties, making an unkillable concrete tank is easier, since enemy Attack is much lower).

[windypanda1]

 

2 hours ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

As for player phase crit builds... well, Hunter's Volley is definitely a legitimate one. Of course, the neat thing about Hunter's Volley is you don't need criticals for many enemies, and when you do, it's a simple matter to switch to a Killer Bow+ instead of some other choice. Also it's a very safe criticial build; if you fail to crit, chances are you still avoided a counter. I'm not really a fan of other critical builds (using swords or gauntlets) because failure to crit can often be messy. The enemy types most likely to need crits to take out are monsters and war masters, in my experience; the latter tends to kill you if you attack at melee and don't kill first, some of the former can too, if you haven't broken them first.

Player Phase combat art spammers don't even need crits to kill the vast majority of stuff if they have Death Blow and Hit+20 anyways. Some examples are: Hunter's Volley (Snipers), Fierce Iron Fist (Grapplers), Swift Strikes (Ferdinand, Seteth, Sylvain), and Point-Blank Volley (Cyril, Leonie). Multi-hit combat arts are seriously powerful and Hunter's Volley/Fierce Iron Fist can make literally any unit good, for example I did a meme run recently and Sniper Anna was one of my best units. These guys can just learn their combat art and spam it for the rest of the game for good results, no crits needed. If you need a bit of chip to knock a bulky enemy into kill range, it's trivially easy to get chip damage in this game thanks to Curved Shot. I guess you'd need crits to kill Fortress Knights but they melt like butter to any magic. Monsters have 0 Luck so it's easy to get crits on them even without any special investment.

 

Why does Astra suck so much. Swordmaster is one of my favorite classes and I'm really bummed out that Astra didn't get as much power as Hunter's Volley/Fierce Iron Fist. 😞

Edited January 9, 2022 by windypanda1

[Shadow Mir]

1 hour ago, windypanda1 said:

Why does Astra suck so much. Swordmaster is one of my favorite classes and I'm really bummed out that Astra didn't get as much power as Hunter's Volley/Fierce Iron Fist. 😞

Because it got the nerf hammer after Fates.

Relevant:

In all seriousness, though, Astra is pathetic in this game; 9 durability cost to use, it gives you decreased hit AND the individual hits themselves are very weak, only doing 30% of the damage of a normal hit. With that much going against it, I'd rather just use gauntlets or a brave weapon if I wanted consecutive attacks.

[lenticular]

20 hours ago, windypanda1 said:

It seems like I’ve accidentally changed the topic to dodgetank builds rather than crit builds, sorry about that.

I do think it's a worthwhile diversion. Dodge tanking and Vantage/Wrath style builds both try to do the same thing, namely creating a viable enemy-phase character. This means that the different builds really need to be compared. I would say that Battalion/Wrath is significantly worse because of the existence of dodge tanking. It's never auspicious to have another build that does the same thing but does it better.

4 hours ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

As for player phase crit builds... well, Hunter's Volley is definitely a legitimate one. Of course, the neat thing about Hunter's Volley is you don't need criticals for many enemies, and when you do, it's a simple matter to switch to a Killer Bow+ instead of some other choice. Also it's a very safe criticial build; if you fail to crit, chances are you still avoided a counter. I'm not really a fan of other critical builds (using swords or gauntlets) because failure to crit can often be messy. The enemy types most likely to need crits to take out are monsters and war masters, in my experience; the latter tends to kill you if you attack at melee and don't kill first, some of the former can too, if you haven't broken them first.

I agree that bow crit builds are the best crit builds because they are the safest crit builds, but they don't necessarily have to be Hunter's Volley builds. Hunter's Volley is typically the best choice for raw killing power, but if you want to trade some of that in for extra mobility, you can make respectible bow crit builds with a Bow Knight or even a Falcon Knight.

2 hours ago, windypanda1 said:

Why does Astra suck so much. Swordmaster is one of my favorite classes and I'm really bummed out that Astra didn't get as much power as Hunter's Volley/Fierce Iron Fist. 😞

Astra is pretty terrible, but crit builds are one of the few places where I'd even consider using it. The raw damage is mediocre and the durability cost is way higher than it needed to be, but the relatively large number of hits makes critting that much more reliable. For instance, if you have a 70% crit chance, then you will get at least two crits 97% of the time and at least one crit 99.8% of the time, whereas if you're attacking twice, you'll only have at least one crit 91% of the time. And of course, if you're only attacking once then you're only critting at all 70% of the time. The reliability is way higher when you use Astra. It's not enough for me to ever really recommend Astra, but it is a little bit of a niche.

(All figures contingent on my having done my maths correctly; double checking is always welcome.)

[Dark Holy Elf]

11 hours ago, lenticular said:

I agree that bow crit builds are the best crit builds because they are the safest crit builds, but they don't necessarily have to be Hunter's Volley builds. Hunter's Volley is typically the best choice for raw killing power, but if you want to trade some of that in for extra mobility, you can make respectible bow crit builds with a Bow Knight or even a Falcon Knight.

Interesting. I've not really built around this; I've used Bow Knights and flying archers to be sure, but rarely build them for crits. If I can't kill things with standard bows, my go-to on these builds is not a Killer Bow, but a Brave Bow or Inexhaustible, which tends to kill the same things more reliably. They have the same weight (or near enough, Brave Bow is +1 on the other two) and similar power, so it feels like there would be a pretty small window of enemies who can survive a brave attack (double or quad, depending on speed) but still die to a killer crit. And even in this window... for the case of not doubling, the effective crit rate of a single shot is inherently not that great, while if you are doubling, you need two crits (6x multiplier, one crit is just 4x) to exceed brave/inexhaustible damage.

I suppose there's the point that if you're leaning very heavilly on these non-standard bows, you can eventually run out of Wootz Steel (and there's only one Inexhaustible) while Black-Sand is limited only by money, but my experience is that there's more than enough to get through the game.

[Shadow Mir]

17 hours ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

I'm not really a fan of other critical builds (using swords or gauntlets) because failure to crit can often be messy.

Why do you mention swords and gauntlets specifically? Because I'd consider the same to be true for lances and axes. Unless I'm missing something here...

Edited January 9, 2022 by Shadow Mir

[Dark Holy Elf]

I've almost never seen anyone suggest player-phase crit-based builds for lances or axes, unlike swords or gauntlets. My comment is intended to cover them too, of course, though.

[Barren]

59 minutes ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

I've almost never seen anyone suggest player-phase crit-based builds for lances or axes, unlike swords or gauntlets. My comment is intended to cover them too, of course, though.

The only thing I can think of for Axes is War Master’s Strike with a forged Killer’s Axe. But that’s quite late in the game to acquire it since most players would rather just get Quick Riposte and take it to another class like Grappler or something.

 

Lances, there is no class that has a lancd crit+10 ability like Swordmasters or Warriors have. I guess the Sycthe of Sariel would be the go to crit lance.

[lenticular]

9 hours ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

Interesting. I've not really built around this; I've used Bow Knights and flying archers to be sure, but rarely build them for crits. If I can't kill things with standard bows, my go-to on these builds is not a Killer Bow, but a Brave Bow or Inexhaustible, which tends to kill the same things more reliably. They have the same weight (or near enough, Brave Bow is +1 on the other two) and similar power, so it feels like there would be a pretty small window of enemies who can survive a brave attack (double or quad, depending on speed) but still die to a killer crit. And even in this window... for the case of not doubling, the effective crit rate of a single shot is inherently not that great, while if you are doubling, you need two crits (6x multiplier, one crit is just 4x) to exceed brave/inexhaustible damage.

I suppose there's the point that if you're leaning very heavilly on these non-standard bows, you can eventually run out of Wootz Steel (and there's only one Inexhaustible) while Black-Sand is limited only by money, but my experience is that there's more than enough to get through the game.

Availability of wootz steel is definitely one of the big factors for me, and clearly that's going to be dependent on a lot of different factors: how many wolves do you encounter (are you recruiting Marianne?), how meticulous are you in making sure you fully break every single monster barrier, how lucky or unlucky you are with ore drops, how many other Brave weapons (or other wootz-requiring weapons) are you trying to use, etc. If you find that you routinely have more wootz than you need then I can definitely see the Brave Bow as being preferable.

One thing that I do like about the Killer Bow, though, is being able to use it completely indiscriminately. For situations of "this enemy absolutely needs to die right now and I need it to be reliable", I'd typically prefer a Brave weapon. But a lot of the time, I find myself in situations that are more along the lines of "well, it would be nice if I got the kill on this enemy, but if I don't get the kill then just doing solid chip damage will be enough". I've got a lot of kills in that sort of situation, where I might have been reluctant to use the durability of the Brave Bow.

There are a few other situations where the Killer Bow is better than the Brave Bow. I agree that there aren't typically too many enemies who will survive a double from a Brave Bow but die to a crit from a Killer Bow, but they certainly do exist. Another advantage is that you can use a Killer Bow with combat arts. (Well, technically you can use a Brave Bow with combat arts as well, but you really shouldn't.) Sometimes you really need the extra range or extra accuracy of Curved Shot, and that doesn't lessen your ability to kill if you're runnign a crit build. Or you can use something like Heavy Draw or Monster Blast, which will increase the number of enemies you're killing with a crit but not killing with a double. Or you can use something like Encloser and have a good chance of getting the kill but know that you still have the enemy unit locked down even if you don't get the crit.

Of course, there's also the "why not both?" argument. If you build around crits, you can still carry a Brave Bow as well and use that in the cases where it's better. Admitedly, being built for crits typically means that your accessory and battalion are serving that purpose but I'm not sure what else you'd hypothetically be running that was massively better.

[Dark Holy Elf]

All good points. I will say that the Inexhaustible tends to be infinitely repairable in my experience (I usually sell end up selling surplus mithril for cash) but there's only one, and obviously you might not even get it. Wootz Steel I agree depends a lot on the variables you mentioned. Brave weapons do benefit some from not being used in combat arts so they end up lasting longer than most weapons if you're not spamming them, but the limits are still a concern, especially if you want to use a lot (and even if you're using less of them, forging them eats into your wootz supply).

It's worth noting that it's a bit harder to build fliers for crits compared to snipers/bow knights, because there's really only one flying battalion with significant crit, (Cichol Wyverns) and it's both highly demanded and requires A-rank authority. In fact for the Lions/Deer there's no other flying battalion that give more than 5 crit, if I'm not missing one? (The Eagles get several with 10, but even then that's behind the 15-20 crit of ground battalions.) Bow Crit +10 is also much harder to reach if you're primarily spending time in non-bow classes, too. Obviously these concerns don't apply to Bow Knight.

[lenticular]

2 hours ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

All good points. I will say that the Inexhaustible tends to be infinitely repairable in my experience (I usually sell end up selling surplus mithril for cash) but there's only one, and obviously you might not even get it. Wootz Steel I agree depends a lot on the variables you mentioned. Brave weapons do benefit some from not being used in combat arts so they end up lasting longer than most weapons if you're not spamming them, but the limits are still a concern, especially if you want to use a lot (and even if you're using less of them, forging them eats into your wootz supply).

Oh, that's interesting. I find that I never have as much mythril as I'd like. I do tend to use both the Spear of Assal and the Axe of Ukkonvasara, though, which I know that not everyone does. If you're using them less than I do or not at all, then I can definitely see how mythril wouldn't be an issue.

2 hours ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

It's worth noting that it's a bit harder to build fliers for crits compared to snipers/bow knights, because there's really only one flying battalion with significant crit, (Cichol Wyverns) and it's both highly demanded and requires A-rank authority. In fact for the Lions/Deer there's no other flying battalion that give more than 5 crit, if I'm not missing one? (The Eagles get several with 10, but even then that's behind the 15-20 crit of ground battalions.) Bow Crit +10 is also much harder to reach if you're primarily spending time in non-bow classes, too. Obviously these concerns don't apply to Bow Knight.

Fair points. I don't personally tend to run a lot of fliers, so competition for Cichol Wyverns isn't really something I run into often (my informal self-imposed rule is typically "no duplicate classes in my end-game team", so I typically have one Wyvern Lord and one Falcon Knight, who usually have Cichol Wyverns and Galatea Pegasus Corps, then possibly also a Dark Flier with Nuvelle Fliers and possibly Claude with Immortal Corps, and that's it). It's definitely a real concern when running more fliers, though. (And more fliers is definitely stronger; my personal rule is definitely not done in the name of optimisation.) Getting to Bow Crit +10 on a flier (or at least, a flier who isn't Claude) is definitely tricky, though. I know that I have run a crit-focussed bow Falcon Knight in the past, but I don't remember the exact details of the run so it may have been NG+ or I may have been showing favouritism, or whatever.

[iridium137]

13 hours ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

I've almost never seen anyone suggest player-phase crit-based builds for lances or axes

War master using Smash with a Killer Axe+?