Dark Holy Elf

You're assuming the SS endgame fight makes any sense. Not a safe assumption, given it already magically only happens on one route despite the same trigger being there on another.

Adjutant guard has a far more potent use than adjutant attacker (which unreliably turns non-ORKOs into ORKOs), so I'd generally rather use the former. This was especially true before the recent patch where adjutant attacks were typically stuck at 10% rate. Adjutant heal is okay I guess. In addition to someone like Cyril, it's easy to switch a benched unit who trained in either brawling or axe to grappler or armour knight. The game rains intermediate seals on you so there's hardly any cost to doing so.

Yeah, Emperor is bad as is, Fortress Knight redux and Fortress Knight is quite possibly the worst Advanced job. Emperor's a little better because 5 move, but still not good. I definitely agree that giving her access to magic would help, though as others note, not as much as it could, because (a) she's weak in faith and has a bad faith list, and faith access is one of the major reasons to be in a magic class as opposed to just swinging a magic weapon around, (b) her Black Magic Crit +20 budding talent is terrible since it only affects two of her four spells, and neither has substantial crit to start with (unlike crit-builds that use killer weapons), (c) she has ways to deal magic damage already with Bolt Axe or Lightning Axe, without neeidng another prowess skill. Flavour-wise I'd love her using magic. Agreed about it being a cool Arvis reference. (Don't really care about the Hardin reference; Edelgard has a lot of nods to Arvis and not many to Hardin.) For what it's worth you get all the Agarthium you need to repair Aymr in Chapter 16, though that only applies to the last two story maps of course. While not perfect, adjutant guards can kinda take the place of Wary Fighter, ensuring that your slow tanky units can't be one-rounded (they guarantee that enemy followup attacks can not kill). This makes defence-tanks less terrible on Maddening than I first assumed they'd be.

I haven't done it myself, but people have reported stealing Caduceus when an enemy carries it, so I imagine any non-weapon equipment can be stolen.

I'm repeating myself here, but: there are lots of ways to raise that accuracy. Aymr is 60. +10 from Raging Storm. +15 from a batallion, potentially more if you want (especially if you aren't using Wyvern Edelgard, for all that I consider Wyvern easily her best class). +20 from axe prowess A (+16 early if you insist). Anywhere from +10 to +40 from linked attacks (Edelgard is lucky enough to support both Meteor users, one of whom is very likely to be played so she has an extra easy time getting linked attack bonuses). +10 from an Accuracy Ring. +20-some from Dex. = anywhere from 140 to 180 accuracy. Even on Maddening, not many enemies go past 50 avoid, and hardly any go past 60, and most of those that do are Falcon Knights (or Seteth/Ingrid/Dimitri) whom you can set Lancebreaker against. By the way, the Assassins and Swordmasters you weight so highly show up on only one map each (plus Felix), and to be honest even the Assassins are quite Raging Storm-able since they don't have Axebreaker themselves (they have avo in the mid 60's, so if Edelgard can get her hit up to ~145 that's 92% real, and if ~155 that's 98% real, never mind the higher end if you want to be 100% safe).

I'm not okay with gambling every attack either, which is why I suggest a variety of strategies for getting your accuracy higher. I've played Maddening and found my axe-users both very effective and very reliable. In fact, most people consider the wyvern line the single best class in the game, and for obvious reasons axes are a good choice on them. You're not just ignoring my experiences, but a lot of people's. Yes, you spend some of the game with lower Prowess ranks, but even then the gap is barely wider... it increases by 1 point per prowess rank lower. It seems unlikely you won't have at least B+ by the time you hit the timeskip, so you're really splitting hairs over that 1 point. Gloucester Knights are B and are attached to a recruit/paralogue you are definitely recruiting anyway because Thyrsus is broken. Empire Pegasus are D. Edelgard is strong in authority and I generally hit A's in strengths around the timeskip myself (also you definitely want someone hitting A authority for those Cichol Wyverns, Edelgard with her authority strength is a good choice), though obviously it depends a bit on exactly what skills you are building and how far. You side-stepped a major question: how would you build Edelgard?

As usual, you're ridiculously dismissive of strategies and you should listen to the multitude of people who do use axes in general/Raging Storm in particular on Maddening and find them extremely effective. How exactly do you propose building Edelgard on Maddening? I'll repeat: axes are not actually that much less accurate than other options in this game (after prowess skills, they're -5 vs lances and -10 vs swords, in a game which provides many ways to boost accuracy). Overlooking an extremely powerful weapon because "well it's an axe lolol" is something you do at your own peril. There are in fact multiple batallions available pre-timeskip with +15 hit or more (Cichol Wyverns, Indech Swordfighters, Victor Military, Gloucester Knights) or immediately in stores post-timeskip (Empire Pegasus, Empire Heavy Knights).

I guess I disagree pretty strongly with this, I think Nemesis is a pretty bad final boss. He comes out of nowhere with little buildup, and is extremely un-nuanced as a character: he's evil and that's it. I think some people want the final boss to be tied with the slitherers, which the other two aren't, and I guess that makes sense, but I still find the desire a bit alien because in general I think the writing of this game is best when it's focusing on things besides the slitherers, and I know many others agree with me on this. If an anime adaptation where to embrace Edelgard as full villain I'd definitely want her to be the final antagonist since she gets so much buildup and there's the emotional resonance with Dimitri (who's going to be the main character, everyone; let's not kid ourselves. Go look at every single character poll for this game). If it goes more golden route then I could see Nemesis, though to be honest I'd want some serious re-writes of the story to be happy with him.

Damage: not sure why you say that. Eirika: 4+40% str Eliwood: 5+45% str Ike: 5+50% str Eliwood and Ike are basically tied (by the time Ike leads by over a point, Eliwood has access to lances). It seems like he has a small lead on Eirika, until you remember her support with Seth grants full power (Ike isn't getting more than 1 power from supports realistically), so again they're basically equal. What isn't equal by the way, is their speed: Eirika doubles more than the other two early, though later on all should do it easily. She's also got the best Rapier since it's the only one with a 3x multiplier. Durability: Ike does have a minor lead on durability, though realistically none of the three are in much danger of dying once they get rolling with supports. Ike gets full avoid (+30!) from Oscar, Eirika gets full def/res from Seth, Eliwood gets full def/res/avo from Hector, all of which are some of the easiest supports to get. Eirika's in a slightly worse place at base, (3 def and 16 HP compared to Ike's 5/19) but it's not as bad as it sounds because non-mage PC defence is just higher in PoR generally (e.g. how Oscar starts with 8 compared to Franz starting with 6). All three start as some of the squishier people on the team, though not so squishy that they're at all hard to level, and grow into frontliners.

Thyrsus will make almost any mage amazing. That's the problem - people attribute to Lysithea the praise they should be attributing to Thyrsus, which is a broken accessory. I definitely agree with her being overrated, she only has one particularly good stat and her utility list I find questionable, though I know that some playstyles value Warp more than I. Others: -Ike (PoR) is hardly different from Eliwood, Eirika, and other swordlords yet he's badass so people try to act like somehow he doesn't have their flaws. (Locked promotion, iffy atk due to low sword might, infantry, lack of 1 range). tbh I'm inclined to say he's worse than them (if we consider Hector Mode anyway), since at least they get a mount on promotion and being unmounted isn't as bad as in PoR for obvious reasons. -Boyd (RD) always struck me as basically trash, those speed/def bases are unacceptable (Rolf has more speed and he's Level 1!) and the niche of high atk is badly crowded out on the Greil Mercenaries (Haar, Titania, Ike, Gatrie... all of whom have more str base than him anyway). If people didn't have an attachment to him from PoR I suspect he'd be almost universally benched. -Most myrmidons (exceptions: Rutger, RD Zihark/Mia) but especially the PoR ones. -Takumi definitely got this early in Fates' life though it felt like that evaporated with time. Yeah, he's less bad than the average Sniper, but that doesn't make him great.

Not a big deal, but Mercedes is actually 22, and turns 23 in Chapter 2. She's older than Byleth. But then, of course, she has to be in that range to be the elder sibling of someone else who is old enough to be an instructor at Garreg Mach...

Not sure why the Fates characters were excluded here... I really like Camilla; I think she's a very unusual character in the series (and I mean that in a good way; especially before 3H there weren't many women I would describe as both strong and messed up), and obviously is an outstanding unit.

Actually, that is exactly how they work, with the key words being "on average". The expected value of a character's res after 10 levels with (X+10)% growth is exactly 1 point higher than the expected value of a character's res after 10 levels with X% growth. Sometimes it'll be more, sometimes it'll be less, but 1 is the average difference. If you want to talk about lower bounds fo (i.e. RNG screwing, such as the 10th percentile of possible values), then +10% res growth is actually less important than that, not more. (Too lazy to post the math now.) Also it goes without saying that I don't think we should consider RNG abuse.

I'm really not sure why we're okay with considering fishing dozens of unnecessary times in non-grind play. If we're considering repetitive, time-consuming activities, then boss abuse and arena abuse in the appropriate games should be fair game as well. (To be clear, I'm fine with anyone who wants to do that on their own playthroughs, but it seems like something a tier playthrough should frown on.)

Mm, it's close, and depends a lot on if you're hitting certain benchmarks. Also full disclosure that I probably use stat boosters less than I should, so perhaps Gremory Dorothea can be set up to get all the key OHKOs she gets as Warlock too. Having said that, the other advantage still holds: less focus on Faith means more time to focus on Authority (for better batallions which will pump the Atk difference even further) andor Reason (to get Black Magic Range +1 sooner, which is an outstanding skill since unlike archers, mages don't even eat an accuracy penalty for getting silly range).

Raging Storm adds 10 hit to that. Axe Prowess adds more hit than other prowess lines, so now we're talking 90 hit where say a vanilla silver lance+ attack is 95. You then can and probably should optimize Edelgard's accuracy further with the help of batallions, Accuracy Ring, and linked attacks as necessary. It's an extremely powerful strategy. Even if you're going for "kill every last one of them", having a combat art which is essentially "kill this opponent, then take another full extra turn" is incredibly good, like having a built-in dance. And you can use this five times apiece on the last two CF maps thanks to the Titanus monsters in Chapter 16.

Yep, I think that'd be fine! I'm just expressing some concern with the way the game currently is.

I generally agree with this, and thus find the attempt to classify route difficulty by roster strength mostly a poor idea. Especially since the differences all but evaporate by Chapter 5 or so.

The issue I have with enemy combat arts is there's no easy way to quickly see which enemies have them (unlike skills in both this game and Fates), so scrolling through to see which enemies have 'em is a pain. Not to say they couldn't have improved the interface so this wouldn't be an issue.

To echo others: if you're building a dodge-tank, then Ferdinand. Otherwise, they're basically interchangeable. You should build at least one dodge-tank, though, and Ferdie is one of the best choices.

On my last Maddening run, I had four units hit Level 40: Dimitri, Byleth, Mercedes, and Dorothea. One pair has an exp boost, the other... well, you can probably guess the common theme. Healing exp isn't reduced, and it's not like the healers can't chip in good damage at points too (in particular, they have free ORKOs on armours and GKs whom many of your physical units might struggle with). So I definitely disagree with your claims of absurdity.

Ah, yeah, I didn't catch that first part. In that case that's more fair, but I don't really understand the point of focusing only on one part of the game, especially since it's (IMO) a relatively easy part of the game, unless the goal is just to pump up Lorenz. If you consider Dark Knight better than Gremory, the others can transition to Dark Knight as well. (And in general, Dark Knight/Warlock are the best classes for OHKOs with magic, if that's what you want to primarily discuss. If you consider the utility of Gremory/Bishop to be more valuable, then that reflects well on the characters making that choice, but it shouldn't be turned into an advantage that Lorenz has over them.) And slightly off-topic, but I personally don't see much point in going for Gremory with Dorothea, she doesn't need move that much (due to all her long-range options) and Gremory over Warlock represents a loss of power (important for a unit who is shakier on OHKOs than someone like Lysithea). Not getting it also lets her laser-focus on Reason (after C Faith of course) to get to the all-important Black Range +1 faster, and yes, Agnea's Arrow as well.

Fair enough. That said when discussing difficulty I'm fine with assuming a variety of play speeds. Slow, methodical play rips Chapters 2-3 apart, whereas you'll need a far more advanced grasp of the available tactics to to the same to latergame maps whatever your playing speed. With that in mind there's no question to me that I consider the lategame more difficult. But again, subjective. I agree that the second half (or so) of the pre-timeskip is the easiest overall regardless.

It's all subjective, but I definitely don't think the earlygame of Maddening is that bad. Chapter 1 is dicey for sure (especially with no Divine Pulse) but after that? I have a hard time somebody would actually get stuck on Chapter 2, which is a relatively simple "bait enemies into your meat-grinder" FE tactics. Whereas we see people getting stuck on later maps like Chapter 13, Gronder 2, and the endgame maps reasonably often. If the lategame maps in this game are easier than the early ones to you, you probably have a very good grasp of some of the advanced tactics (proper utility gambit use, dodge-tanking, one-turn shenanigans), in which case I refuse to believe that the earlygame would pose much trouble for you either, OR you grind a lot.

Your list excludes damage before B reason, where he's bottom of the pack. Focusing on B to A around Level 15-20 is his best time for peak damage, and yes he's #2 there by a small amount. Once others hit A he falls to middle of the pack at best, and you ignored Dorothea's A+ Agnea's Arrow or levels past 20 where superior magic growth will push Mercedes ahead and allow Annette to catch him. Comparing him individually to the other student mages: -Hubert deals significantly more damage early, then comparable damage the rest of the game (significantly more against horse opponents of course). He gets 3 range from Mire. -Dorothea deals more damage except at B to A+ Reason, has 3 range from Thoron, has Physic, has Meteor. -Linhardt is perhaps the only student mage who's clearly worse at offence than Lorenz, but you don't use him for that; you use him for Physic and Warp. -Mercedes has better offence as Lorenz outside the B to A range, and has Physic, Fortify, and Live to Serve. -Annette's one of the game's more questionable pure offensive mages, but does have Rallies, and ultimately has far more peak damage on her own route with Dust, or against fliers. -Marianne has comparable overall offence, but has Thoron, Silence, and Physic. -Lysithea is better at the pure offensive mage thing. Every one of these characters has more of a niche than him and I'd rather use any of them. You mention he has slightly better bulk and that's true, but he also has worse charm (except than Linhardt, who as acknowledged only sees play because of his faith list), which pretty much locks him into using utility gambits and also interferes with his supposed advantage in hit-taking.