Silly

When have you ever run out of magic... Not to mention that the Levin Sword, the lightest magic weapon (outside of the gauntlets, which are terrible) weighs 9. Which means that outside of seige magic, the only Reason tome that is heavier than it are the super high level ones (Agnea's Arrow, Dark Spikes, Hades). Don't even get me started on the Bolt Axe, which weighs 15! There aren't that many. Edelgard is probably the most obvious one given her standout magic growth (though she probably doesn't actually need to use a bolt axe to kill armors, she can just use a hammer). Lorenz also sports a fairly high magic growth which you can access with a magic weapon if you don't want to put him in Dark Knight. Other than that, they're very niche, but can be used by units that happen to have gained a respectable amount of magic (maybe RNG is nice to you). It isn't out of the question for someone like Ingrid to be doing more damage to armors with a magic weapon, given that she has a 35 Str and 35 Mag growth.

Edelgard has on average ~30 Str at level 30. With a Silver Axe+ she has 47 attack. There are many, many enemies with more bulk than that. If you do not double you do not kill. Saying that you reliably ORKO enemies with a silver weapon is just straight false.

No no no no no. Magic weapons on mages is a huge, HUGE trap. What niche does a magic weapon have? It allows your physical unit to target enemy res, which means that against high def, low res enemies you're hitting their weaker stat. What does a mage not need? An additional weapon that lets them hit enemy res, because they ALREADY hit res with literally any of their attacks. Also take into account that using a magic weapon instead of any spell you happen to have means that your attack is not boosted by Reason/Faith Prowess (as a mage these will likely be your highest weapon ranks) and is not affected by Thrysus or Caduceus Staff. There are very few situations where you have access to magic but still choose to use a magic weapon instead.

So there are a few issues with this. 1. Swords are one of the worse endgame weapon types. They have low might and the worst endgame classes (either you're stuck with a footlock unit or you miss out on +5 damage from Swordfaire when they're already the weakest weapon type). Ferdinand most of the time wants to be using Axes. Especially because you also have Alert Stance in your build, which really, really doesn't synergize with Sword Proficiency 5, as that requires you to spec into A+ swords and A+ flying when that combination leads into no class. 2. Alert Stance is pretty good, but will not be active in many situations because you have to actually do things on player phase. 3. A support Adjutant comes at the opportunity cost of deploying an adjutant on a different unit, and the Evasion Ring comes at the opportunity cost of using a different equipment (granted, the opportunity cost of another equipment is a relatively minor one). Overall, while it does have its moments where it is useful, dodgetanking is too niche to be something you can rely on.

Keep in mind that brave weapons are only excellent on player phase. On enemy phase they're hot garbage. If your unit does not ORKO on enemy phase with a Silver weapon then often the best option is a Killer weapon.

Now you're going to tell me that Armor Knights in GBA are high tier because "you can just play slow" and take 20 turns to clear every map when most maps are perfectly beatable in less than half that time with a normal pace of play. Nobody mentioned anything about LTCing the maps. Even with casual, moderately efficient play the class is still bad. The fact of the matter is that low movement has been crippling in every Fire Emblem game where high move units are good enough. Even if you're playing casually and not LTCing maps. When the rest of your team has +2/3 move on your armor and the ability to ORKO enemies, what generally happens is that your armor knight never gets to fight enemies because they all die before you can get there. In order to utilize her more than just a few combat steps in each map, what generally needs to happen is that you need to intentionally slow down your other units and prevent them from killing things, or you need to spend other resources on her in order to let her keep up with the team. Not to mention more movement just makes you more flexible overall. Silver weapons definitely do NOT get the ORKO on typical enemies without combat arts. The Amyr does, but that's also one of the best weapons in the game and you shouldn't be using up its durability frivolously on generics. And relying on combat arts to kill is suboptimal because you can only access them on player phase, whereas naturally doubling and killing enemies means that you ORKO on both player phase and enemy phase. A unit that can only ORKO with combat arts kills one unit on player phase. A unit that can ORKO naturally kills one unit on player phase and in most situations can kill up to 2-3 units on enemy phase. Also the "put armor knight in range of a few enemies, bait them in, and then kill them on player phase" strategy is just... not great when you could have just put a unit in range that actually killed those enemies when they attacked you. Surely you can see that baiting a few enemies, NOT KILLING THEM, and then having to spend player phase actions to get rid of them is worse than putting a unit in range to bait a few enemies and having them kill themselves on enemy phase, letting you do whatever you want on player phase. Explain to me how +3 HP (as well as stats that don't matter) is better than 1 Str and 2 Mov, plus canto??? What kind of logic is that. Plus Great Knight also situationally has +2 speed. Also Great Knight really isn't that hard to access when Edelgard has proficiency in two of the three requirements. Wyvern Lord is still accessible on units with zero proficiencies in any of the requirements (for example, Felix), so don't go telling me that Great Knight is impossible on a unit that is strong in both axes and armor. The +res skill is a personal skill. It is available regardless of what class you pick and therefore irrelevant when comparing classes. The fact of the matter is that Emperor is pretty much worse than both of the other axe using master classes (not counting War Master because of genderlock). It's pretty clear the Wyvern Lord is the better class, but Emperor also doesn't compare favorably to Great Knight either. And being the worst of all of the other axe options you have does not make for a relatively good class.

Dodgetanking isn't really reliable in this game outside of some corner cases, imo. Sometimes the enemy misses you and that's nice, but are you going to take the 40% chance that they hit you, remove your +15 avoid bonus, and then the rest of the enemies attack you and kill you? Probably not. You're likely going to be putting your unit in a place where they can safely take on only enough enemies that they won't die. That being said, Ferdinand is a fairly good unit. His stat spread is respectable and skill proficiencies that make it fairly simple to access whatever physical class he wants means that he should turn out well no matter what you do with him (unless he gets stat screwed or something). He just isn't top tier in my book, since the better units just have even more strengths than he does.

The main niche of Killer weapons in this game is when your units can't ORKO. If you can grab the ORKO with a different weapon without relying on a crit, then obviously just do that. Sometimes you run into that sweet spot where if you use a low weight weapon, then you don't have enough enough might to kill the enemy, and if you use a heavier weapon you stop doubling and miss the ORKO. These situations crop up not infrequently, in which case you can try to roll for a 50+% crit with a Killer+ weapon. This becomes more reliable as you stack other sources of crit on top, such as Crit +10 from weapon rank, as well as any potential class skills. Sometimes it doesn't work, and you're left with a weakened enemy that somebody else can easily finish off. Other times you crit and get the kill, which frees up the action of your second unit so that they can do something else. It's not guaranteed but is better than using a silver weapon, not getting the KO guaranteed, and always needing a second unit to follow up. ---------------------------------- Also, the Mace is a lot better than Helm Splitter. Helm Splitter is pretty bad because it doesn't double, so I've basically never run into a situation where it is the correct move. Later on the Hammer is obviously better, but early in the game the Mace is pretty decent.

It's literally a slightly better Fortress Knight, in a game where Fortress Knight is a terrible class. It has two really bad traits. One, it has 5 move at a time where the majority of your army should have 7-8 move. On every single map the class consistently falls behind and finds it hard to contribute unless you intentionally slow everyone else down to accommodate. Two, it's slow, and in this game if you don't double enemies you're going to find it hard to ORKO. Level 30 Edelgard has on average 19.6 speed as her exclusive class. That's slow enough that you won't be able to double medium speed enemies, and will only be able to double the slower ones with less than 16 AS (and that's assuming you don't weigh yourself down). On the other hand, Wyvern Lord Edelgard has on average 27.6 speed at level 30. That's a difference of EIGHT speed, and means you double enemies with 24 AS or less, which is a much wider range. You can maybe sneak in a one-shot on player phase with a very strong weapon and a combat art (for example, using Edelgard's prf), but that obviously isn't ideal when you could be ORKOing on both player phase and enemy phase with a regular weapon. Also I have no idea what you mean by "incredible strength" and "good res" when the class has a ZERO strength or resistance stat boost. (There's a skill that gives her +4 Res on waiting, but that means that she doesn't get player phase combat and that skill is a personal skill which is available on EVERY class.) Edelgard's class is just not good. It's not even just outclasssed by Wyvern Lord, it's also outclassed by Great Knight. Compared to her exclusive class, Great Knight loses 3 HP, 1 Lck, and 2 Cha, which is perfectly acceptable considering Lck and Cha are probably the two worst stats, and in return gains 1 Str, 2 Mov, and canto. This is much better, as the class keeps the high defense of her exclusive class, but doesn't have movement that is awful. Also, Great Knight has the ability to trade 2 Def for 2 Spd by dismounting, in situations where it needs slightly more speed to meet a threshold, whereas her exclusive class must always deal with being slow. Just because the class is exclusive doesn't make it good. You can use it, and it can contribute if you're willing to slow down and accommodate its low movement and other weaknesses. But the truth of the matter is that there are just much better options available.

Edelgard's exclusive class is pretty garbage, so you should still worry about her weapon ranks. Her best class by far is Wyvern Lord, so better hope you were training flying. Granted, the game is still completely beatable even if you don't plan things out and make suboptimal decisions, so there's really nothing wrong for you to just put Edelgard into her exclusive class and then call it a day. It just won't be the best option you could have picked.

Your units should almost always have a weapon that minimizes their AS loss, just so they have the option of hitting their maximum speed when they need to. The one exception is super fast units, who might find it acceptable to be permanently weighed down. Early in the game this will generally be Training+ (the upgrade gives -2 weight, so it's essential that you upgrade these ASAP), but later on you might be able to use Iron/Iron+ or possibly even Silver/Silver+ (if you have a weight reduction skill) as your primary weapon. After that, fill the remaining slots with other weapons that are situationally useful. Early on this will probably just be things like Iron and Steel weapons for additional might, maybe a ranged weapon (though Hand Axes and Javelins in this game are real bad, so I don't even give them out most of the time, having a bow as a backup is fine though), or effective weaponry on chapters where it is relevant (no point in carrying a Mace around if there are no armors, but if there are, give your unit one in preps if they need it). Later on, I find that the most useful supplemental weapons to my light weapon are Killer+ (if nothing is going to ORKO, at the very least you can roll for a 50% crit), Silver+ (all purpose high might), Brave/Brave+ (you don't want to spam these because Wootz Steel is quite valuable, but they're nice to have on hand for when the situation calls for it), and maybe a relic weapon. Of these, your light weapon (probably Iron+ at this point), Silver+, and Killer+ are your bread and butter weapons, as their materials are purchasable in infinite quantities. Your Brave and Relic weapons are your backups for when you need their damage output to get a kill. Don't spam them but don't worry about using them either. Magic weapons are highly overrated. If your unit already has access to magic, then you already have a way to target res. Instead of using a Levin Sword you could have just cast a spell. In fact, your primary spellcasters will do better just casting spells than trying to attack with magic weaponry, as spells benefit from any Reason/Faith ranks that you might have achieved (as a spellcaster, Reason/Faith is probably one of your highest ranks) and can be boosted by Thrysus or Caduceus Staff. Magic weapons should primarily be used by physical units (who actually benefit from the ability to hit res, because they couldn't before) with an acceptably high magic growth that do not have access to spells. The list of units this applies to is... not that many.

There are plenty of ways to deal with assassins and other high speed enemies. 1. Fast females can double and ORKO them if they have Darting Blow. Given that Pegasus -> Wyvern Rider -> Wyvern Lord is a pretty typical path for female fliers, it isn't uncommon for you to have a flier that can swoop in and murder a high speed enemy. 2. Mages can generally one shot high speed enemies with a strong spell. This is made much easier by stacking +range (from 1-3 range spells, staves, and S rank magic), which allows you to engage from outside enemy threat range. 3. Most reasonable physical units can ORKO these fast enemies with a Brave weapon. Having a Brave weapon on hand for situations like this should be pretty standard for most of your fighters in the later portion of the game. Combat arts that hit twice can also serve the same purpose. 4. High strength units can sometimes one-shot these enemies if they use a strong weapon, especially if they use a combat art that boosts might.

Thrysus is usable by anyone with a crest though, so using it on Lysithea is an opportunity cost because she is taking it away from another mage. Granted, I do think that the difference between 4 and 5 range isn't huge. So really you ideally need one of your two mages to have 1-3 range, so that one can pick up Thrysus and the other one can go with the Caduceus Staff and both can have 4 range.

One thing to note is that there are two main roles that mages need to fill in your party. One is healing, the other is dealing with problem enemies on player phase. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In terms of healing, you definitely need at least one physic mage on your team, in my opinion, and I personally like to have two. Mages that do not have access to physic are just hot garbage at healing. It's very, very unrealistic for you to expect for 4 move mage to always be next to the person they are trying to heal. And positioning to heal someone without physic simply screws with your movements too much to be optimal. In terms of healing, this is basically just a binary thing. Do you have physic? If so you're a good healer. Do you not have physic? If so, you're probably not a good healer. Your actual magic stat doesn't matter too much, because the difference between the common mages only ends up being the difference of a few points of healing here and there. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In terms of combat, the big traits you're looking for is enough speed to reliably double or enough magic to just one-shot the enemy without needing to double. Basically you just want your mage to actually do their job of killing one thing on player phase. Afterwards, having 1-3 range is good. And access to meteor is a nice bonus as well. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Finally, this isn't a necessary role that you need to fill in your party, but is very nice to have: access to Warp makes some maps go by a lot easier. The big winners here are Lysithea (who is the best warper in the game) and Lindhart (who also provides good healing utility due to physic). I don't really count Manuela here because she is the worst warper and doesn't contribute very much outside of warp.

Dancer class is best on whoever your ~10th best deployable unit is. Basically, pick the person that got rng screwed and is closest to being benched from your main lineup and just reclass them to dancer. There's no point in taking a good unit and making them a dancer when a shitty unit performs basically just as well as a dancer. In one scenario you have a good combat unit and a dancer, in the other scenario you have a shitty combat unit and a dancer that can maybe sometimes do other things if they're not busy dancing. Except the situations in which you shouldn't be dancing with your dancer are super rare.

In terms of magic users, the magic classes themselves are kind of bad, since they're squishy and are locked to 4 move for the majority of the game. However, magic itself is important enough that you probably want a couple of units that can use magic for its utility. I generally like having two physic users deployed on maps. Magic users that don't get physic are much, much worse at actually healing, because needing to be next to someone to heal them when you have 4 move is awful and gameplay-wise makes you contort your unit movement significantly away from what is normally optimal. I think Lindhart might actually be the best utility mage. He get access to Physic at C as well as Warp at A, which are both very useful spells. Notably, he is a male, so he cannot access Gremory. If you want to have two warps, you need to be a Bishop, in all its 4 move glory. Marianne and Mercedes are a probably a bit worse because Warp is better than their other strengths, but still pack the same utility in being a physic bot that can occasionally nuke an enemy. Marianne notably has Thoron (as well as a strength in riding to reach the ranks for master tier the easiest), whereas Mercedes learns Fortify. Dorothea can also do work here, with access to Thoron and Meteor being other very important spells in addition to her Physic. All these mages are perfectly good units and you want at least one of them (and imo probably the second) on your team. Mages that don't learn Physic are supplemental to your one/two physic users. Of them Lysithea is definitely the best by far. She is by far the fastest to learn Warp, since B rank is a lot less exp than A rank (since later ranks take more exp to unlock), and her personal ability doubles her faith exp in battle. With dedicated training, you could have warp as early as chapter 4 or 5, which greatly speeds up the clears for those maps (assuming you want to just go and kill the boss). And her offensive growths are the highest, so if you want to kill someone dead she is the most reliable. Then Hubert for good offensive growths and 1-3 range. Then Annette, who has nothing really going for her, then Hanneman, who is incredibly, incredibly slow and might as well just be a walking Meteor.

In my big brained, fairly objective opinion, the great physical units are, organized roughly into two tiers: Dimitri, Petra, Leonie, Felix, Catherine, Claude, Byleth, Edelgard Steteth, Sylvain, Hilda, Ingrid, Shamir, Cyril You can of course use other units and be fine, but units in tier 1 are on average the best, while units in tier 2 are pretty good as well. Most important classes to have easy access to are Bow Knight and Wyvern Lord, as they are objectively just the best physical options. Most important stats to have high bases and growths in are Spd and Strength (most important), then Def, Dex, and finally HP. Res is occasionally relevant. Lck and Cha are basically dump stats.

Raphael is usable because no character is actually straight garbage in this game. Promoting to Wyvern Rider and Wyvern Lord patches his godawful speed enough that he will still be good with effort. But statistically he is one of the worst units in the game. Somebody has to be the worst, and he is in the running for it. Being one of the worst is not such a bad thing given every unit in this game is usable with a bit of effort, but it's true. Gauntlets are just not great outside of the early game, and as a result aren't really a significant niche that sets him apart from anyone else (not to mention literally any male can reclass into War Master and pick up gauntlets, but I don't know why you would do that when Wyvern Lord exists and is miles better).

Iron Gauntlets+ on enemy phase: 1 mt, 3 weight, 95 hit, 5 crit. Training Sword+ on enemy phase: 3 mt, 2 weight, 100 hit, 0 crit. --------------------------------------------------- Silver Gauntlets+ on enemy phase: 4 mt, 7 weight, 90 hit, 5 crit. Iron Sword+ on enemy phase: 6 mt, 5 weight, 100 hit, 0 crit. Keep explaining to me how gauntlets are good on enemy phase.

When comparing weapons, you should probably do so based on their upgraded counterparts. For example, Brave Bow+ has 11 mt, 80 hit, and 12 weight, which means that statistically it only loses to the Inexhaustible by 1 point of weight. This is especially true since all but the brave weapons on your list have purchasable crafting materials, so they should basically always be upgraded as long as you have the cash to do so. Also there should be a distinction made between relic weapons and saints weapons. Relic weapons are gold, and will damage any non-crest wielder by 10 every time they use it. On the other hand, saints weapons are silver, and do not have an HP penalty associated with using them.

It's a huge pitfall to assume that just because someone has access to a class means that they serve a important niche. You're assuming you need to have a diverse class spread, but you really don't. If Paladin is the best class at killing things (as it is in most FE games) then having more Paladins instead of a Fighter or whatever is a good thing, not a bad thing. The War Master has no significant niche. The purpose of most physical combat units is to kill enemies. A secondary objective is to be able to take his reasonably well, because that lets you fight on enemy phase and therefore kill more enemies per turn cycle. The War Master doesn't do anything particularly special beyond this, and you can exchange it with any other class that serves a similar purpose. Do you know what else does the same thing as War Master? Wyvern Lord. Except Wyvern Lord is significantly faster and has better defense. Also it has 8 movement and canto and ignores terrain penalties. Not having access to War Master is not a significant drawback for physical units, because there is the option of a better class instead. It's like saying that Lysithea is worse off because she doesn't have access to Dark Mage. That's really not true, because Dark Mage as a class is heavily outclassed by Mage. She doesn't miss it at all.

I'm going to chime in and say that Raphael is pretty bad statistically. Anecdotal evidence is meaningless when talking about character ranking, so I'm only going to use pure numbers here. Now what are Raphael's downsides? Well his most obvious one is that he is incredibly, incredibly slow. His speed growth is 15, which is horrendous. As in his growths usually won't even keep up with class bases. Assuming you follow a route to War Master (which people seem to be advocating), he only has on average 18 speed at level 30 (his average speed by then is actually LESS than that, and is only bumped up because 16+2 is the minimum speed a War Master can possibly have). What does this mean? Well it means that he has trouble double attacking even moderate speed enemies. And in this game, most of the time if you do not double an enemy you have no hope of ORKOing them. (There are some exceptions, but for the most part this is true.)Now how can we fix this problem? You can use gauntlets on player phase to help him get KOs. But gauntlets suck as a weapon type. They have good player phase early on, which is a niche, but they come with the drawback of being literal garbage on enemy phase due to their low might, which is bad. And later on a strong but slow unit with gauntlets is outclassed by a faster and slightly weaker unit with a brave weapon. So overall gauntlets just fall off hard later on. This means that Raphael is likely killing one enemy on each player phase and weakening a few more on enemy phase. Which is fine but significantly worse than what better units can contribute, as all of the better units can kill one enemy on player phase and then kill whoever attacks them on enemy phase as well. ------------------------------------------- In addition, a common misconception is that Raphael has very high strength. He doesn't really. His strength growth is 50, which is only slightly above average (for reference, the average strength growth among physical units is roughly 45, obviously mages have much worse strength). His base strength of 11 is definitely good, but his numbers aren't enough to put him significantly ahead in strength on average compared to another unit in the same classes as him (since classes do of course affect growth rates). Having a few less points of strength and being able to double matters a lot more than having a few more points of strength and being incapable of doubling all but the slowest enemies. The primary tradeoff for his horrendous speed growth isn't strength, but is actually his HP and Def growths. But it's much better to have a unit that can fight 2-3 enemies on enemy phase and kill them all, rather than one that fights 4-5 enemies on the enemy phase but kills none of them.

I can confirm that Lysithea is a free recruit on the Empire route in part 2. I built no support with her in part 1 and when I killed her in part 2 the game gave me a prompt to recruit her. She was a bit disappointing though, because her enemy stats were much higher than the stats that she joined with.

It might also be helpful to record when each paralogue happens. That way people can tell based on where they are in the game, whether someone is worth attempting to recruit for their paralogue or not.

The invisible stat changes you're talking about can be found here: https://serenesforest.net/three-houses/classes/class-change/