Silly

This point has been brought up many times, and this is the point that I will raise to many of your thoughts. The fact of the matter is that many of the things in this game that seem cool are superfluous. People like hitting for big numbers but many people who praise those big numbers do not question whether they are actually necessary. The (maybe unfortunate) fact of this game is that the statistical benchmarks required to perform well are not particularly high. Here is a brief overview of your points: Exclusive combat arts are not particularly important. They are nice bonuses but certainly not enough to dramatically shift the quality of a character. Here is a more detailed post: With that being said, Cyril is a fairly decent unit. He's not as good as Leonie, who has pretty good bases relative to her join time and more access to teaching (which means higher weapon ranks earlier on), but he is a solid performer. I personally rate him as either the low end of high tier or the high end of mid tier. Dodgetanking is a valid build. It is not as bad as some people are claiming, but also not as good as others are claiming it to be. Its biggest flaw is that it requires stacking a lot of avoid before it becomes pretty reliable, and the tools for that are in limited supply. As a result, you can usually have maybe two units max on your team as dedicated dodge tanks. If you already have Ferdinand and Byleth as dodgetanks, for example, well what about the third and the fourth unit? Where are you going to get extra high avoid battalions (which are very limited for fliers), extra evasion rings, and extra adjutant slots? The other 8+ units are going to have to suck it up and actually have real defenses. Assassin is probably the best swordfaire class. However, you are out of your mind if you think that it is comparable to Wyvern Lord. For your specific points: bow proficiency really means nothing on the class, as it does not have bow range or bowfaire abilities. Gaining extra bow exp at this point is pretty meaningless at this stage, as you will probably be using swords a lot (due to swordfaire) and assassin is already an endgame class, meaning you do not really need extra bow ranks to certify into anything. 6 movement is nice, but you're literally comparing assassin to the most mobile class in the game. You claim the assassin's +1 move over other foot units in advanced tier is nice, but Wyvern Lord has +2 move over assassin, and not only does it ignore terrain penalties like assassin does, it can just straight up fly over otherwise impassable terrain like walls, something that assassin cannot do. You also claim that the March Ring gives the assassin more mobility, but that applies to all units. In fact, the March Ring is actually more beneficial to fliers than any other unit, as fliers are not hindered by any sort of terrain features (including walls) and have canto, meaning they will be able to use the extra movement point most effectively in most situations. Assassin is the best choice if you want an endgame class that uses swords (aka has swordfaire), but it is certainly not the best choice if you're looking for the most effective class in general. Locktouch is a nice touch but chest keys are buyable in infinite quantities, so it's not a huge deal. Especially on Byleth, as he/she basically has innate locktouch due to having access to the convoy. War Master is not considered an optimal final class because it is mostly an endgame class for males with an axe proficiency, meaning it competes directly with Wyvern Lord on most viable candidates. And it just so happens that Wyvern Lord is really, really busted. As I stated in an above quote, you don't need the higher strength of War Master or its extra crit to actually kill enemies. You again claim the War Master's 6 move as a strength here, but again, Wyvern Lord has 8 movement and flies, meaning it ignores walls and takes no terrain penalties. If you have two units that both ORKO most enemies, except one has 6 move and is footlocked and the other has 8 movement, flying mobility, and canto, well the unit with higher movement is going to accomplish more, as it is going to be more flexible in its positioning, accomplish side objectives more quickly, and just straight up be able to reach and deal with enemies in an easier fashion. Quick Riposte is a very strong skill, but it does not make up the ground between the two classes. First of all, master tier class mastery comes incredibly late. Without grinding, you will likely hit it in only the last few chapters on your more dedicated combat units. And on my BE playthrough I didn't hit master tier mastery on a SINGLE unit, because that route has less chapters than the other three and therefore less time to build mastery. In addition, think about what Quick Riposte does? It allows you to always double on enemy phase, and allows you to avoid getting doubled on enemy phase. What else does these things? Just simply having high speed. Quick Riposte gets worse the faster you naturally are, since much of its effects you just get anyways by being fast. It would be a really good skill on an armored knight, and a really poor one on an assassin. Conveniently, Wyvern Lord happens to naturally be one of the fastest classes in the game (why they decided to make this class so fast is beyond me) with a massive 20 base speed and +4 speed bonus. Wyverns naturally reach doubling thresholds on all but the fastest enemies, and those enemies can usually be dealt with on player phase (since player phase combat has much more lenient thresholds than enemy phase combat), so most of the time they double the same enemies that War Master does with Quick Riposte. As for Ferdinand, he's probably high tier. He's not the best unit in the game but among the cast he has qualities that make him stand out from the majority of units. He should roughly be in the same tier as the other "has the qualities that make them one of the better performing wyvern riders" units, such as Sylvain and Hilda. I would personally place these units at solidly high tier. Not top tier, but since top tier contains so few units for me, being high tier still means that you are one of the best units in the game. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- TL;DR: There is a big difference between what is viable and what is optimal. Very little in this game is not viable, outside of maybe stacking too many really dumb things onto the same team, like Bishop Raphael with his 15 Mag and 15 Spd growths. You can be a Swordmaster and still have fairly reasonable combat. You can be a Grappler. You can be a Fortress Knight. However, there must be a distinction made between being viable and being optimal. Just because Assassin is a viable class does not make it optimal. Just because War Master is a viable class does not make it optimal. If the game contained an alternate class that was literally just Assassin but it had 7 move, it doesn't make the existing Assassin class any worse at clearing maps than it is now. However, it does make it a comparatively worse choice, because why promote into an assassin when you could promote into "basically assassin but better"? It is very hard, and some would even say impossible, to achieve perfect balance. The fact of the matter is that some classes and units are simply going to be worse than others. In a ranked list, something has to be put at the bottom. (And classes like Assassin and War Master aren't even at the bottom, they're solid choices that are unfortunately not broken like the top tier choices are.) This is not an attack on a unit/class/whatever or a claim that the it is unusable. Because pretty much everything in this game is usable. It's just saying that it isn't as comparatively good as something else.

If you don't have warp by this point you can instead use Bernadetta/Ashe to aggro Miklan over the wall with Deadeye. This obviously still takes significantly longer than just warp skipping, but it cuts considerable time off the map, because instead of having to walk alllllll the way around with your slow units, Miklan will start coming to you as well, so you really only have to walk about half or two thirds the distance.

The issue is that even with a Thrysus mage is that your effective attack range is still worse than higher move units. On turn 1 you can move 4 squares and attack 4 tiles away, so your effective range is 8. This matches a pegasus with a bow (though pegasus is more mobile due to no terrain penalties) and cavalier (though not cavalier with a bow), and is better than foot units at intermediate tier. So the first turn is fine. The second turn, she moves 4 squares and can attack 4 tiles away, so her effective range over two turns is 12 tiles. This ties normal foot units with 2 range (such as archers), and starts losing to pegasus and cavalier by a noticeable amount (pegasus gets 12 move unrestricted by terrain plus its attack range, cav gets 14 move plus attack range). By the third turn, mounts are really far ahead of you, and if your mounted units have been doing their job properly your mage shouldn't really be in range to attack people beyond this turn. This gets worse at level 20, since paladins have 8 move and wyverns have 7 move and are not genderlocked, meaning they are much more readily available than pegasi were at level 10. Mages can have good combat in the first two turns or so, but if the map is large (and there are a lot of large maps) then past that they will sometimes struggle to find targets. ----------------------------------- A lot of this is moot if you just warp and bosskill on turn 1 though. But on maps that take longer, or if you dont play absolute LTC, then you will run into this issue.

Retribution comes on: BL D rank battalion, BE A rank battalion, all routes A rank battalion (also can be obtained for free in Manuela + Hanneman paralogue) Stride comes on: All routes E rank battalion, BL D rank battalion, all routes B rank battalion (not buyable, requires Sylvain paralogue)

You can also just have Darting Blow on a Wyvern. Pegasus Knight is a perfectly acceptable intermediate class for female fliers who want to end up in Wyvern (such as Edelgard, Hilda, Petra, etc.). It's a much more mobile class than Brigand, has an equally good master skill, lets you start training your flying rank earlier, and doesn't have any wasted weapon exp since Lance C is a requirement for Wyvern Lord anyways.

To be honest quadding with a brave weapon isn't super hard. The super fast enemies that you don't naturally double are fragile enough that they usually just die to two attacks, so you don't need to quad. And Wyverns are naturally quite fast and can double pretty much every enemy that you actually need to quad to kill. Also, Darting Blow is a thing that your Wyverns might have, since Pegasus -> Wyvern Rider -> Wyvern Lord is probably the best general path for female fliers to go, and basically means that you will always double on player phase. Gauntlets are mostly good in the earlier half of the game when doubling is still tricky due to being weighed down by everything. They tend to fall off later on compared to other weapons.

I don't think battalion vantage works with a dead battalion. Also, vantage is not very useful if you do not OHKO enemies. Whether or not you attack first doesn't matter unless you're killing the enemy with your first attack.

The big issue here is that most of these skills are pretty bad by themselves. It might specifically be decent on Dimitri because he gets both Wrath and Vantage, but I don't see how having only one of those three skills would be very helpful.

The arrow weakness on fliers basically doesn't exist. 1. You can just kill the archer on player phase. You should be doing this anyways because you normally can't counter archers, so its more efficient to kill them on player phase and let the enemies you can counter kill themselves on enemy phase. In fact, fliers are specifically the easiest class to do this with, since they are highly mobile and ignore terrain, allowing them to close the distance to the archer from outside of the archer's attack range in many situations. 2. Archers can miss you if you're stacking avoid. They don't have absurdly high hit, often take hit penalties from attacking from range, and fliers are more dodgy than they honestly deserve to be in this game. 3. In the absolute worst case scenario, you can just press the dismount button. Dismounting is a free action, so you should really only be hit by arrows for effective damage if you mess up and somehow put your flier in range of an archer and then don't dismount.

But Wyverns can actually just one round pretty much every enemy in the game. That's part of what makes them broken.

Here is a question, if the majority of classes are equally as good at killing enemies, why pick the one with 6 move when you can pick the one with 8 move? Getting a crit for 120 damage or whatever as a War Master doesn't really make much of a difference. The enemy is still dead regardless of whether you hit them for 100% of their HP or 200%. It's not that the other option is unusable. It still kills enemies dead. It's just that in the context of an actual tier list the option with more mobility is clearly better, so it has a higher rank. Being low tier in this game isn't such a bad thing, because there aren't really any truly unusable things (with the exception of maybe some weird stuff that nobody would actually do). But something has to be the worst.

Also a lot of students get screwed by late recruitment because their default weapon rank priority is not in the right place. For example, late recruiting Lysithea makes her considerably worse because she doesn't train Faith by default. On the other hand, late recruiting Leonie is okay since I believe her primary weapon ranks put her on a reasonable path to being a Bow Knight, even if you only get her around chapter 9 or so.

You don't need the matching crest to use Thrysus. You just need any crest, so it's not something that is particularly special about Lysithea. Personally, if you're playing in the nebulous middle ground of "efficient" play, then Lysithea is a bit overrated. Warp is not the most important thing ever like it is in LTC, and she's somewhat hampered by her awful movement and complete lack of an enemy phase holding her back. She's a good unit, and probably the most viable non-physic mage by a huge mile, but she isn't completely broken (I don't even think she's top tier in this context).

I don't think that skill is very good. It's helpful but very unnecessary. It requires Lance A, which is a non-negligible investment given that the "optimal" class for all three of those units is Wyvern, which only needs Lance C. That extra tutoring could be put into something like authority instead. It also requires you to actually use a lance, which means you instantly lose out on ~6 attack (due to no axefaire and the difference in might between lances and axes). Swift Strike is only active on player phase. It does not improve enemy phase combat at all. Player phase combat already has significantly easier thresholds to meet compared with enemy phase combat, since you have access to other combat arts, Death Blow, and Brave weaponry. Overall I just think that skill doesn't really make that much of a difference. It's nice to have and might be situationally useful, but its impact on the overall viability of the unit is not significant enough for me to change my opinion of the character significantly.

Just going to point out that this is highly unrealistic. Sword Avo means giving up your dancer, which is one of the better units in an efficient run. I would assume this does not exist. Sword level 5 means you're using a subpar weapon type (and is also not on the direct path to any flying class). I would expect +15 avoid at most from here (Bow or Lance Prowess) or +10 on Wyverns (Axe Prowess). The +20 avoid battalions are incompatible with fliers. I believe the highest avoid you can get on a flying battalion is +15, and that is locked to the GD route. With the other two routes (or if you have a second dodgetank on GD) you can only get up to +10. Also, the avoid rate on rattled units definitely goes down by more than 10. I think on my runs enemy hit rates were roughly ~20 higher when my units were rattled. But I didn't test this extensively. After trying it, dodgetanking is fine imo. It's perfectly acceptable to do on 1-2 units per run and will usually make them unkillable. The numbers are more shaky than you make them seem though. It's certainly not 0% chance of getting hit ever regardless of positioning.

I think its probably better to actually go Pegasus Knight with Shamir. Though I haven't tested it myself yet, it seems very good in theory. It's incredibly trivial for her to hit it since all it takes is D flying (literally just 100 exp, which is obtainable in under a month), and you end up with a unit with good bases early on in a very mobile class. Nothing is stopping you from continuing to use bows as a Pegasus Knight if you need 1-2 range, since you have close counter for free.

You could also make Felix into a Bow Knight and just have 4 range permanently and 8 move. Also I think I may have underestimated Shamir. She probably deserves to be on a similar tier to Catherine in most lists.

I mostly just treat Advanced/Master class mastery as though they don't exist. None of the skills are particularly broken, and they all come super late, so their impact on the game is pretty small.

The first Horseslayer shows up in a chest on the third DK map if you're on NG. It's still definitely possible to kill him without it though. Having a lance user is really nice, since you get Knightkneeleras a combat art. Especially if you're BL or are playing as female Byleth, since with Sylvain in your party you get access to the Lance of Ruin before the second DK fight, which has a ridiculous amount of might.

I do think that Lysithea is a little overrated by most people. In terms of pure LTC she is still top tier just because of her extremely early access to Warp. The difference between only needing to get to B rank and needing A rank is actually very huge, since later ranks require increasingly more amounts of weapon exp. For reference, going all the way from E+ to B rank for Warp access on Lysithea takes the same amount of exp as going from B rank to A rank on the other characters (which is where Manuela and Lindhart learn Warp). In terms of just efficient play I found her to be less good than most people were claiming she was. She still has the typical mage weaknesses of poor enemy phase combat and low mobility for most of the game, so I often found her falling behind (as is typical of mages). Especially if you warp someone on turn 1, since doing so means you have to stick around near the starting location instead of moving on the first turn. She is still by far the best non-Physic mage, but I wouldn't put her in top tier in the context of an efficient but non-LTC playthrough. Also, 5 uses of Physic is reasonable on maps if you're playing efficiently. Say your mage attacks someone on the first two turns or so (the turns where there is actually likely to be people in range for you to attack). Then you use Physic every single turn afterwards. By the time you're out of Physics, it's already turn 8. At that point you should have already finished or be close to finishing a typical map. If you have 10 uses of Physic, you will basically never run out unless you're going super slowly. Also, you could just use two different Physic mages, which would put you at more than enough uses even if neither of them are Bishops/Gremories.

Later ranks take a lot more exp than earlier ranks, so getting to C Faith is not a big investment. Going from E rank to C takes less exp to get to than going from B+ to A rank, let along going from A to A+ or A+ to S. Also, there is a big, BIG difference between having Physic for almost the entire game, and having S rank reason or A+ riding for maybe the last few chapters. Physic provides utility for the entire game, and even if it actually meant that getting +1 range was delayed for a chapter, I would much rather have 15 chapters of Physic compared to one extra chapter of +1 attack range. That's not even accounting for the fact that mages without Physic are more limited in their exp gain because of how slow they are, so if you're playing relatively quickly you'll need to either accept that they'll fall behind, or intentionally go out of your way to feed them kills. Mages with Physic can kill enemies on the first two or so turns, and when they fall behind can still build exp by healing members that are further ahead, which means that they hit level 30 faster and can transition to a class that doesn't have awful move.

Literally everybody gets: Lightweight 1-2 range spell at D Reason. Stronger 1-2 range spell if you need it at some higher Reason level. Some of the spells in the above categories are slightly better than others, but they mostly function the same in the majority of situations, so it's not a huge difference whether you have Fire or Thunder as your basic spell, for example. Having spells that fall into the above two categories does not really give you a particularly special niche, as that role is filled by literally anyone with reason training. The good reason spell lists generally have something else that occupies a different niche outside of the above two categories. Most commonly this is 3 range, but sometimes there are other niche spells like Meteor. This is not even touching on faith magic, which is the category that I actually think makes or breaks a magic user. Not having access to Physic is a pretty big death sentence for dedicated mages, to the point where I would really prefer not to even use a mage without access to Physic.

I'm pretty sure there is a zone trigger that makes him start escaping. It's definitely possible to accidentally enter the zone and trigger it early on if you have some combination of flier + stride + warp. The first time I played the map I accidentally triggered the event on turn 1, and none of my units were positioned correctly to get to him. So I just went back to the start of the map and killed him on turn 1 instead.

Annette does have a bad spell list though. For the most part, the basic spell at Reason D is going to be your bread and butter spell. Everyone learns one of these spells at D rank and they're relatively close in terms of how good they are. In addition, basically every unit learns more powerful 1-2 range magic, which is just a heavier, stronger version of your basic spell. Any extra spells you learn should mostly be judged on what situations they cover that your basic reason spells don't. Things like Thoron, Meteor, Bolting have extra range, which is nice when you can't reach with your other spells. Annette really has none of that. Also her Faith list is bad, because of no access to Physic.

Master class growths are overrated. How many levels are you going to be spending as a Bow Knight? You can only promote into it at level 30 at the earliest, and unless you grind, endgame level should be roughly level 40-45. The Sniper's 5% growth advantage in Str and Spd translates to a massive half a point difference at level 40.