Silly

If you want the best offense, Dark Knight is basically always the way to go. On characters with good support spells (Physic, Fortify, Rescue, Warp), you are usually willing to sacrifice combat in order to be a better support unit. Your good physical units already have most of the combat covered, so comparatively a magic unit is more useful by indexing into utility. Given that this is the case you want to be in a class that doubles your usage of those spells, meaning you go Gremory or Bishop. Gremory's main advantage over Bishop is +1 move, and main disadvantage is -10 healing. Both traits can be very useful, and which one is more important may depend on the map and your playstyle and the character in question. Gremory also has double black magic uses as a bonus, but this is mostly only relevant for Dorothea.

I think the best summary would be that being a Sniper is good when you're bad. The difference in damage output between Sniper and Bow Knight is actually considerable if your unit is not statistically great. If you have a shitty Bow Knight that doesn't double naturally and doesn't do much damage per attack, then being able to double guaranteed with a Silver Bow or a Killer Bow will be more damage than attacking normally with anything. In this case, Sniper is better. Having an 8 move unit with canto that does no damage is much worse than having a 5 move foot unit that can actually kill things. However, the better your unit is, the smaller the damage difference between the two classes is. If your unit is fast enough to double most enemies naturally, then Hunter's Volley has very little usefulness. Likewise, if you're one-shotting everything anyways (say you have a Wrath build or something), then there is also not much point to Hunter's Volley. If Bow Knight and Sniper are getting the same kills, then you obviously pick the class with 1 extra range, 3 more movement, and canto. These are all ridiculously huge upsides, and make the Sniper class look laughable in comparison. If your unit is a core team member, and is likely getting levels and stat boosters to ensure their stats are always competitive, then I would say Bow Knight is the better choice by far. Even on Maddening, if you're using good units, then the team members who get the majority of resources can very realistically stay above the threshold to double everything (besides the ridiculously fast enemies). If your unit is less good though... either they're falling behind or weren't given any stat boosters or they were adjutant leveled for most of the game (and therefore aren't as high leveled as your core team members) or whatever... then I think that you might be able to consider putting them in Sniper so that you have an extra filler combat unit.

Yes. The serious answer is still Wyvern. It has good offense, fairly decent bulk, and has enough speed that even super slow units like Dedue and Raphael might not get doubled, even on Maddening. Also, having unrestricted mobility and canto is even more useful when enemies are strong, because it opens up a lot more options for which enemies you can safely attack on player phase, since you can always canto to a tile that has less danger afterwards.

The actual serious answer is Wyvern Lord, Wyvern Lord, and Wyvern Lord. Yes, even Dedue, who has a flying weakness. It seems kind of silly, but that class just has so many benefits that you will find that even otherwise "bad" units can still perform when reclassed to Wyvern. This is especially true for a unit like Gilbert, who actually joins with really solid bases. Reclassing him to Wyvern Rider instantly patches up his abysmal speed, and he can start doing reasonably well as a general combat unit afterwards. If you want to do something else (sometimes playing with a bunch of Wyverns might not be your thing), then War Master is also a pretty solid class with very good offense. Great Knight is an alternative option, if you really want a tank. It's probably a better choice compared to Fortress Knight because the extra movement and canto are very valuable, and more than makes up for the slight defense difference.

Catherine's base Sword Prowess (B+) is only +8 hit. Getting any unit to E+ Swords grants +5 hit (and is incredibly trivial to do). I doubt the 3 extra hit going all the way from E+ to B+ rank is going to make or break things. Basically, Thunderbrand is not an exclusive weapon. Catherine just so happens to join with it, but many other units can use it to equal effectiveness. If Thunderbrand wasn't stopping those other units from going something like Wyvern, then it is certainly not stopping Catherine from going into an actual good class like Falcon Knight.

Reclassing to Pegasus Knight is relatively easy and can be done in like 1-2 months. Intermediate class requirements are just not very high. This is something that probably is a good thing to do anyways, because it gets you a 6 move unit with flying mobility, canto, and great base stats at a time when most of your units are still pretty weak. By the time you hit level 30, you've had months of tutoring and have been sitting in Pegasus Knight for nearly 20 levels worth of combat building weapon exp, so the Falcon Knight reclass shouldn't be an issue at all. Also, saying "Catherine isn't in a class with Swordfaire for Thunderbrand, which is a problem" is the same as saying something like "Claude isn't in a class with Swordfaire for Thunderbrand, which is a problem", and you can see how silly that second statement is. Thunderbrand isn't an exclusive weapon. Anybody with a crest can use it with zero penalties, including a unit like Claude/Ingrid/Byleth/etc. So why don't any of these units reclass into a sword class in order to deal more damage with Thunderbrand? Because the benefits of the better class are much more important than having Swordfaire. (The only difference with Catherine is that she gets access to a combat art, but that combat art is pretty garbage because just attacking regularly with Thunderbrand is almost always more damage.)

Here is a much more reasonable tier list for endgame classes, under the assumption of relatively efficient play. This is technically ranked based on maddening mode, but the hard mode list would look identical. S+ : Wyvern Lord S : Falcon Knight, Bow Knight, Wyvern Rider A : Gremory, Dark Knight, Bishop, Paladin, War Master B : Holy Knight, Sniper C : Assassin, Grappler, Mortal Savant, Great Knight, Warlock D : Swordmaster, Warrior, Hero, Fortress Knight Classes near the top of the list have massive strengths that far outweigh their weaknesses, and will be consistently useful on every run. Classes near the bottom are either bad, outclassed, or have no significantly noteworthy strengths. Realistically, no unit that is a "core" member of your team should be forced to end on anything lower than an A tier class unless you're intentionally doing something different.

I went through and wrote down the enemies with decent stealable items. All Routes: Ch6 Priest (Magic Staff): 17 Speed Ch7 Dimitri (Evasion Ring): 22 Speed Ch7 Claude (Evasion Ring): 24 Speed SS: Ch 15 Gwendal (Lampos Shield): 6 Speed Ch 16 Ladislava (Aurora Shield): 38 Speed CF: Ch 12 Flayn (Caduceus Staff): 21 Speed Ch 12 Seteth (Ochain Shield): 29 Speed Ch 12 Rhea (Seiros Shield): 24 Speed Ch 14 Lysithea (Master Seal): 31 Speed Ch 14 Hilda (Accuracy Ring): 32 Speed Ch 15 Flayn (Caduceus Staff): 25 Speed Ch 15 Seteth (Ochain Shield): 38 Speed Ch 16 Felix (Aegis Shield): 54 Speed Ch 17 Mercedes (Rafail Gem): 32 Speed Ch 17 Rhea (Seiros Shield): 30 Speed Edelgard Paralogue Wyvern Lord (Energy Drop): 34 Speed Edelgard Paralogue Nader (Aurora Shield): 42 Speed No data on other routes, but I'm positive that AM has Ladislava as well, and pretty sure that Dimitri's Paralogue has a stealable Energy Drop on a Paladin (realistic) + Angelic Robe on a War Master (a million AS).

One big issue with Steal is that you have to be faster than the enemy in order to steal their stuff. This is actually a problem on maddening because half of the good stuff is on enemies that have like a million speed.

I do agree that it's unrealistic to expect most mages to reach Fortress Knight. B Axe B Armor means that you're wasting way too much weapon exp in unhelpful skills. Even if we assume we're only going for the minimum pass rate we would need C+ in both Axe and Armor, which is still hard. However, I do want to point out that in the context of a LTC run Annette's best two classes are actually Paladin and Wyvern, with the Wyvern leaning heavily on Bolt Axe + Crusher to deal damage. For example, this is an old video of a 2 turn LTC clear of the Petra/Bernadetta paralogue (Hard Mode), which is generally considered to be one of the most annoying maps. It makes important use of the extra damage and mobility that Wyvern has over the other classes that Annette has access to.

Nonrecruited units gain 64/56/48 weapon exp (Normal/Hard/Maddening) each month in each of their two default weapon ranks. If their weapon rank is lower than the requirement for their class when you recruit them, it will get bumped up to the class minimum when you recruit them.

Fro what I've seen, most LTC runs either do no optional maps or all optional maps. It depends on what the runner wants to do personally, but those two criteria seem to be the most common. -------------------------------------------------------------------- Also, speaking about recruitment in LTC. First of all, Sylvain should be considered a trivial recruit because it's pretty standard to go female Byleth in a LTC setting. Secondly, If you optimize professor level a little Byleth actually gains weapon ranks at a much faster rate than students do, so you can hit many of the requirements to naturally recruit students. Right now the common LTC strategy has Wyvern Rider Byleth actively leveling Lance, Axe, Bow, Authority, Armor, and Flying. These are weapon ranks you already need to actively put points into to pull off certain LTC strategies, so the opportunity cost for recruiting students that need these ranks is effectively zero. Given that this is the case, the students that you need to actually put some small amount of effort to recruit in LTC are as follows (roughly ordered from easiest to hardest to recruit). Note that about a third of them come for free depending on your starting house, so you really only need to put in effort to recruit 6 students at most. Felix (guaranteed recruitment with B support) Linhardt (requires B support and RNG recruitment, can guarantee recruitment with B support and D Reason) Lorenz (requires B support and RNG recruitment, can guarantee recruitment with B support and D Reason) Petra (requires B support and RNG recruitment, can guarantee recruitment with B support and D Riding) Marianne (requires B support and RNG recruitment, can guarantee recruitment with B support and D Riding) Annette (requires B support and RNG recruitment, can guarantee recruitment with B support and D+ Faith) Lysithea (requires B support and RNG recruitment, can guarantee recruitment with B support and D+ Faith) Caspar (cannot B support, requires D+ Brawl and C+ support) If a student isn't on the above list, then they literally require zero effort to recruit them in a "typical" LTC run. Concerning the above six recruits, recruiting only six students isn't super difficult via gifts, since you get a looooot of them for free via gardening (it's optimal to basically only plant flowers), quests, lost item pickups, and maybe buying the cheap gifts. There is a bit of RNG involved, but since most of these students don't really care about recruitment time you can just pump them up to B when you have the resources to and just wait for them to come to you. Also if you can skimp a little on some of the previous weapon ranks (say you only need C lance instead of B lance) then you can level Reason/Riding instead to get more guaranteed recruits. Technically their recruitment does have an opportunity cost, if you really want to take that into account, but that opportunity cost is low enough that it's very possible to pay without impacting your turn counts at all.

You don't get battle preps for this chapter, so reclassing or assigning alternate gambits is unfortunately not an option. The recommended solution would probably be to go back to a previous save to set things up better for chapter 13. If you can do that, then let me know and I can maybe suggest some setup tips for that chapter. If that is not possible, try these tips. You have access to the convoy. Byleth/Seteth already get doubled by most things, so consider pulling out a shield. If you have a Silver Shield, that will save you 8 damage every combat. If you have Felix's personal shield (say you recruited him and did his paralogue), that saves 12 damage per combat. Also consider pulling out bows, so that your units can potentially chip enemies without taking damage. The group in the upper left and upper right should not be in danger. Most of the enemies on the map don't move until you enter their range, so those two groups can mostly stand still if they're too weak to fight. The bottom left is in danger because those units spawn within enemy threat range. On Church route though, that unit is Petra, and if she is a flier for you she can likely escape to a safer tile.

There is a relatively reliable 5/6 turn clear of chapter 13 on Maddening for Golden Deer and Church Routes. If you're really struggling with the map because a lot of your units are bad then you can potentially use this tactic to mostly skip the map, as the only unit that really needs to have good combat is Byleth. Requirements: Relatively strong flier Byleth. Swordbreaker and Alert Stance really helps here. You also want enough damage to ORKO Pallardo. Requires 48 attack and 35 AS, alternatively rig a crit on him. Warp on Linhardt/Lysithea based on route, with 16+ magic (but preferably more). Bernadetta/Ferdinand or Raphael/Marianne based on route as your Dancer. Strategy is to just have Byleth slowly make his/her way to Pallardo. You can mostly dodgetank with Alert Stance. (Can also dismount in bushes for additional avoid.) On turn 5/6 you kill Pallardo. Then your warper warps your dancer as close to Byleth as possible, you dance Byleth, and then Byleth kills Pallardo again. This is the only turn that you don't have Alert Stance active, but it doesn't matter because the map should be over. The upper left and upper right group of students shouldn't be in danger. Claude/Seteth also should be relatively safe because they fly. The bottom left group is the only one that is potentially in danger (Petra on Church and Hilda + Leonie on GD), but if you reclass them into a flying class (which should be relatively standard) they can also remain relatively safe.

Recruited units have fixed stat gains, but those stat gains are based on their personal + class growths.

Ignatz doesn't have the best growths though, and archer has bad enemy class growths so that doesn't really help him. For example, compare Ignatz's Ch 12 recruit stats with Hilda's or Leonie's stats. Also, reclassing into Assassin might be temporarily nice but he has a really hard time reclassing into a better class for later. This means he's stuck as an Assassin for a long time, which is an okay class but isn't spectacular. So you just end up with a statistically mediocre unit stuck in a mediocre class. On the other hand, any student who naturally trains axes (such as Hilda) can spend 2 chapters training flying rank and then reclass into Wyvern Rider, which is an incredibly good class, so you end up with a unit that has both better stats and is in a better class. If you recruit Hilda at the start of Ch 10, for example, you can spend the rest of the chapter and then the next month training flying, and have Wyvern Rider Hilda ready for the Ch 11 mission at the end of the month.

Raphael's bulk is overrated. It's not significantly higher than many other students, and is not a particularly exciting reason to recruit him in my opinion. Rally Strength is more important, but for this purpose he is worse than Annette.

Because base Raphael has 7 defense whereas base Dedue can have up to 12 defense due to his personal. Raphael isn't actually that much tankier your other students. He only has +1 defense over Ferdinand and Sylvain, and actually ties in base defense with Leonie. Except Ferdinand/Sylvain/Leonie have many other traits that are more valuable. On the other hand, Dedue's +5/6 defense lead over your other students at base is huge. He is likely the only unit you have in the first few chapters that can live through multiple rounds of combat in enemy phase. When you're still at the point in the game where you get doubled by everything, Dedue's +5 defense lead means that Raphael is potentially taking 10 extra damage per combat, which is a huge amount given that HP bars are at most in their low 30s.

If you mostly keep students motivated through food for the first half of the pre-timeskip, you end up building up a lot of free stuff that you can give them to keep students happy. You have flowers every week (which you should basically exclusively be planting), you have buyable gifts (you can at the very least buy the cheap ones), you have lost items, and you have gifts that you get for completing quests. Also a few other random mechanics that incidentally boost motivation. Later on post-timeskip, you can go back to eating if you really want to (say you ran out of gifts to sustain keeping everyone happy). By this point Byleth should have more than enough activity points, and nothing important to spend faculty training on, so you have a ton of free time to do whatever you want.

Assuming you recruit as early as possible, Shamir averages 16 speed at level 16. The later you recruit her the worse her speed is, since she doesn't really gain any speed via autolevels.

I recruited the majority of the students, through a mix of weapon ranks and supports. I kept everyone at full motivation. I also hit A+ professor level in Ch 10 I believe. Keep in mind that Byleth basically doesn't need to train Authority, since he/she will likely be fighting a lot and gains increased authority per battle due to proficiency. A fair amount of your flying/axe rank will also come from fighting. In this aspect female Byleth has an advantage because as soon as you reclass into Pegasus Knight you will start getting 4 flying wexp every battle, which means you don't have to train flying as much as male Byleth does. Also, you will generally have spare activity points every day. The number of students that you need to keep motivated scales with your prof level, but so does the amount of activity points you have to eat meals. (Even ignoring the fact that you will probably stop eating meals after a certain point). At D rank you have 1 spare activity point. D+ rank you have 2, C rank you have 2.5, C+ you have 3.5, B you have 4. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ General tutoring path is: When faculty tutoring unlocks, train flying + lance with all your spare activity points, with the goal of hitting D flying, D+ lance (minimum requirements to reclass in the Pegasus Knight). Requires 14 tutoring sessions max, but will realistically be less since you can occasionally get greats when tutoring, and you're presumably doing some fighting with a lance. Let's say you hit level 10 and are aiming to promote somewhere around the end of Ch 5. This gives you 10 weekends worth of activities after tutoring is unlocked. Say you battle on three weekends, leaving 7 explore sessions. At most you will need to tutor twice each week to hit this (you have the spare points to do this starting at D+ professor level), but some of the earlier weeks you can probably tutor once and still hit the requirements. The next breakpoint we need to hit is C Axe, C Flying, which is the minimum requirement to promote to Wyvern Rider. This requires 500 wexp to hit, which is at worst 25 sessions. This is actually quite substantial, but keep in mind that we are a Pegasus Knight by this point, meaning that every five battles with any weapon will automatically shave off one tutoring session from our requirement. Fighting with an axe will also shave a little bit of the requirement, but it takes 10 battles with an axe to shave off one tutoring session. Let's say that level 20 happens before the end of Ch 9 (which is reasonable for a slower run but is probably too early for a LTC or super efficient run). This gives us another 14 weeks to hit requirements. You're probably at least C professor level by this time so you likely have 3+ spare activity points, but let's say we start throwing in cooking at this point. That still gives us a minimum of 28 tutoring sessions that can be spent contributing towards our weapon ranks. It's probably realistic to assume that we can contribute ~20ish tutoring sessions towards our Wyvern weapon ranks and throw the remaining points towards either Bows or Heavy Armor, which would be enough to get one of these ranks up to D+. The rest of the pre-timeskip dates comprises of 9 more free weeks. At this point I think it would be reasonable to assume that you're at B or higher professor level (I had personally hit A+ by now). This is also past the time where it is realistic to have transitioned over to primarily using gifts to raise motivation. This means that you have at minimum 6 spare activity points after cooking, which gives you a potential 54 tutoring sessions over 9 weeks, but you will likely have more since I'm just assuming B professor level. For example, having A professor level at this point gives 72 spare actions. For reference, your promotion target is likely to be something like C Lance, B+ Axe, B Flying. You can also probably hit C Armor and C Bows with your spare activity points. Getting to C in both Armor and Bows (from the ~D+ rank you had before in one) takes roughly 21 sessions. Bumping Lance up to C requires an additional 6 sessions. Flying up to B takes 19, and Axe up to B+ takes 33. This is a total of 58 sessions maximum for your core weapon ranks and 79 sessions if you want your auxiliary ranks (armor and bow) as well. Keep in mind though that every four combats that you enter as a Wyvern Rider shaves both one session off both your flying and your axe requirements, and at this point it is possible that Byleth can be using the Knowledge Gem, which means that every combat you enter is the equivalent of a faculty training session in terms of total wexp gained. As always, these requirements are also reduced by getting greats. The numbers above are rough estimates. The slower you go (and the more fighting you do) the laxer they become, because you are getting more and more weapon exp from combat.

There are not very many good ways to spend activity points, so you will often have a good number of points to spare on faculty training. Cooking is extremely good but is limited to once per explore. Arena is fairly good post-timeskip, but its rewards are less significant pre-timeskip. It does give you good professor exp if you want that though. I usually only do this if I have extra points to spare. Eating is pretty pointless past the first half of the pre-timeskip due to how easily obtainable gifts are. Cathedral gives such little bonuses that it's not super important to do. +1 Charm from tea time is a very negligible increase in stats, and isn't that relevant except on Byleth who can stack it many times. But Byleth should already have a ton of charm because you get a free tea time every birthday. With some reasonable professor level optimization, it's very realistic that by the time the timeskip happens Byleth has Wyvern Lord requirements + B Authority + C Armor + C Bows, or possibly better. If you want to, you can savescum for the students you particularly care about to ensure you recruit them at the optimal time. But the other students you can just boost their rank to B when you have spare gifts and then just let them eventually come to you. You might not recruit them this month but you have plenty of time to do so. It helps that a fair number of students that you probably care about recruiting have requirements that Wyvern Byleth will probably meet at some point naturally, so you don't need to rely on RNG at all to recruit them. Ferdinand, Ingrid, Sylvain (for female Byleth), Mercedes, Hilda, and Leonie are all good units that should be close to zero opportunity cost to recruit via weapon ranks.

I think you're really overestimating how difficult it is to recruit students. It's not super hard to do full recruitment even of efficiency. Just explore a lot, plant flowers at every opportunity (something you should be doing anyways), and buy the cheap gifts every month. Sure, you don't need to recruit every student, and it might not actually be worth it to recruit some of the worse ones, but if you wanted to you have more than enough resources to do so. The opportunity cost for recruiting is only significant for the first few chapters. Also, Ferdinand is not difficult to recruit. Byleth ends up with more than enough free activity points to hit the weapon ranks that you need if you explore frequently, and Armor is a very desirable skill to train. Even if you didn't want to recruit Ferdinand, you will likely be spending spare points there anyways. It takes 9 faculty training sessions to hit D+ armor (-1 for each two greats you get), which you can definitely spare. If you didn't start working on Armor until Ch 6 and tutor twice each explore, then you should already fill 8/9 sessions you need to hit D+. D+ is also the requirement it takes to recruit Ferdinand via stats (at C+ support), so recruitment in Ch 7 is quite realistic. Even if you hold off on recruiting Ferdinand, he doesn't get any worse, since his default training is in two good skills and his autoleveled growth bonuses are good. It's very easy to hit C by the time you hit the timeskip (and as mentioned before this is a weapon rank you actively want to hit), meaning it is well within the realm of possibility to recruit Ferdinand anywhere between Ch 7 and Ch 12 without going out of your way at all.

Is this formula fully accurate? Chance = Stat-booster co-efficient + (combined [ Grade – 1 ] of all seeds x 5) + (number of seeds x 6) + (cultivation Tier x 5) Planting five flower seeds and doing max cultivation would yield a combined grade bonus of 50 ((3-1) * 5 * 5), a number of seeds bonus of 30 (5 * 6) and a cultivation tier bonus of 30 (6 * 5), which gives a total chance of a stat booster that exceeds 100%. However, I have definitely failed to get a stat booster from 5 flower seeds + max cultivation before.

Shamir's best trait is her really good early damage. She starts with 18 Str and Bowfaire, and due to her base A bow rank she will likely be the only unit you have that can use a Silver Bow for a while. She also has the Lance rank to easily go into Pegasus Knight if you want to trade damage for mobility. Her growths aren't the best though, being below average in both speed and strength, and her base speed of 14 is okay but not incredible for this point in time. I found that she was often missing out on doubling as result, which made her a useful midgame unit but not spectacular. I assume that with a few stat boosters fixing her speed she would be able to remain useful for the entire game (or at least most of it), or alternatively you can keep her in Sniper forever for Hunter's Volley, which would also solve her speed issues (at the cost of only having 5 move).