Pie Burritos

Darn, missed out on Yuri. I don't think I'll do a long analysis either on Seteth, and I'll just put him as B as well. I do want to note that I think his unique action is quite good because it will completely ignore an enemy's guard and lift them up into the air for combos, which is nice. You just have to clip them once with a strong attack or combat art or whatnot. Though it will never top unique actions that increase attack range or mobility. Other than that, he's definitely solid, nothing worth complaining about but nothing particularly amazing either.

I do. Ignatz is a nerd and a scaredy-cat. And so am I. He's definitely a bit whiny, but honestly, who wouldn't be given his personality and position. The guy isn't cut out for war. Makes me think of Raiden from MGS2.

Good PSA. I wasn't aware that converting all ores into Umbral Steel / Mythril was the best conversion rate. Another note is that if you're doing many playthroughs it is definitely worth waiting to sell your stuff until you get the tactic that increases the price at which you can sell your stuff at for the rest of the chapter. It's delayed gratification but boy is it some gratification (over 1 million gold from selling alone).

I just tested Dimitri for Flying. Not sure about Launch. Also tested Essence of Lightning after removing his personal skill and came up with nothing. High Lord / Great Lord S1 S2 S3 S4 S5 S6 S7 C1 C2 C3 C4 C5 C6 CLA --- --- --- --- --- --- F --- F* F F* F F F^ *Only when charged ^Great Lord only, two bar filled attack, last hit (ground slam) Again, I only tested for Flying. I'm not sure how to test for Launch because Boost Aerial Attacks only activates after the launch and there seemed to be a lot of stuff activating it so I got kind of confused and decided it'd probably be best to not include it. For example the S1 doesn't launch on standing foes but the S2 hit afterward seemed to be activating Boost Aerial Attacks if I landed a S1 on a foe who had already been knocked down prior. I decided to stop testing there because I wasn't sure of my methods. Flying is easy enough though: if King's Might activates, then it's Flying.

Ideally you have your character set up so either they do enough raw hp damage that everything dies or you have a combat art + combo that will shred a stun gauge for you (the latter of which is the First Playthrough staple, so I'm definitely familiar). I agree that Awakening can help out a lot with that since the stun gauge goes down faster but I see of it more as a crutch rather than something to rely on if you really need it to get consistent stun gauge breaks. That being said, I guess if you're not getting WTA all the time it would end up mattering a lot. But that's the other thing, if you're switching characters constantly and issuing orders, you will probably have WTA. And of course, Awakening locks you out of switching. I dunno, I'm probably undervaluing it but it just feels terrible not being able to switch because then you aren't being efficient since you need to spend time manually moving to places. But ending Awakening early also feels incredibly wasteful. It just feels bad. Which is why I hate it. But it's probably just as good as you say and I'm being biased.

Claude

I'm not especially opposed to specific difficulties harshly limiting your resources, but I am against it being a NG+ thing. I feel like with NG+ you should always just be getting more and more and losing something during the transition to NG+ just feels weird. Of course, this is just a sentiment rather than anything concrete, but I feel that most people would probably share that sentiment. That being said, combat arts and magic are just way too strong and honestly kind of kill the game for me. Ok, killing the game is a bit of an overstatement but I'd like the game better if it were more combo centric with arts to supplement rather than just letting arts destroy everything with combos as the supplement. I'd love to see them nerfed into the ground. But it would be weird to have them nerfed for just the last difficulty for NG+ so I wouldn't actually want to see it happen.

I'm planning on marking Lysithea down as A too since she and Dimitri basically do the same thing. The magic spam relic helps for sure but it's not like she has anything else to do at all while Dimitri can clear crowds with his combos while waiting to come off cooldown. She also dies really easily whereas Dimitri can afford a mistake or two (at the potential expense of an S rank). I'm definitely getting ahead of myself though, so I'll just go ahead and wait till Claude becomes the next topic of discussion.

You guys pretty much said all the things I'd want to say about Shez. I'd consider Shez to be the best unit in the game. Not the best by a mile, but the best by a fair margin in my opinion. I honestly find it baffling how you could consider Shez not in the S tier while Dimitri is, but I guess this is why this is a community made list. About first playthroughs vs NG+ playthroughs: if we're going to ignore the massive level gap that will inevitably exist between Shez and all the other units in NG+, I'd say Shez is actually better in a first playthrough. Lacking damage skills hardly matters when you don't have access to those skills and Shez still has several tools that makes them significantly stronger than most other units such as Shadow Slide and the Fluegel class. Also Shez levels up really easily due to all their area clearing combos. Characters who lack area clearing abilities tend to level up slower by comparison, and the speed of leveling up matters in a first playthrough.

Dark Spikes is probably the go-to spell for Shez since it takes down lance users they'd otherwise be disadvantaged against and also takes out great knights who would be tough to break through due to their insane def. For tome users it's a great spell but there's more of an argument to run Hades over it. Edit: I suppose any regular spell would be sufficient for a great knight though since they have horrible res. Not that I know because I've only ever run Luna and Dark Spikes on Shez, one of which doesn't care about res, and the other of which deals effective damage and instantly kills any great knight it touches.

Dimitri

I noticed that Edelgard, Dimitri, and Claude all have support conversations with each other. If you go to the title screen and navigate to the support conversation viewer, you can view their support conversations as long as you've completed the Byleth recruited ending. They're the conversations they have with each other while the three are stuck in Zahras. However, in actual gameplay, these support conversations show up in a NG+ playthrough and you can build them up to C rank through record keeper battles and having them fight with each other. However, once you get up to C rank and attempt to view the conversations, the game informs you that you can't view support conversations and progress the rank if they're not both in your active army. Which is impossible as the three are never playable together. Well, except for in Zahras. So I got them up to C rank and progressed the game (in Azure Gleam) up to the Zahras chapter, but I still couldn't view them, because Edelgard and Claude don't actually join your party. I tried viewing the conversations the normal way by simply talking to each of the house leaders, but this didn't do anything regarding their support ranks either. So I'm curious. Has anyone found a way to unlock these supports? If not, does this hint at some kind of DLC? Why would they even code these conversations as supports when they could have just as easily made them regular events? I mean obviously I'm not actually missing out on these supports because the game forces you to view them if you recruit Byleth, but it bothers me to see a dull blue "C" with a lock next to it instead of a bright green one.

I agree, however there is one relatively good usage for Fallen Star, which is destroying large monsters. Since the monster is so large, each individual arrow will hit and chew through the monster's health bar like no tomorrow. I wouldn't bump Failnaught up just because of that, but it does at least have some kind of use. Otherwise it's just kind of slow and the damage against smaller targets is underwhelming.

While I would like to give my two cents, I don't feel I have even that: my experience with using Edelgard is much more limited compared to other units. While I agree that she seems amazing, I'm not prepared to officially give her any rating because I haven't used Amyr yet and haven't experimented at all with her other skills. Nor have I gotten War Strike on her. I'll definitely be back to rate units I do have more experience with.

Shez

It does feel a little weird but I personally don't mind having Advanced and Master classes separated, and I don't mind certain movesets getting abandoned (I do mind some), since you can always just go back to that old class. Advanced classes in many cases are not inferior to Master classes at all. It's like the whole thing where Vegeta never learns SSJ3 and just gets really good at 2. It's not like 3 is strictly better. What does bother me is that certain unique warrior specials get abandoned. I love Lorenz's rose petals but there's no way I'm not making him a Dark Knight. Another thing that bothers me is class base stat and growth bonuses. Dark Bishop and Gremory have strictly better class growth rates and class stat boosts than their predecessors, and they both feature a relatively clunky moveset, especially Gremory. This is one case where the Master classes seem designed to just be better. Anyways, it's pretty clear that the way they designed classes in this game is tied with the weapon rank system, which is of course tied to which combo strings are available, which is why Great Knight could never come after Paladin. Unless they wanted a lance wielding Great Knight, which would either force them to create a new moveset, or would just be redundant because Paladin already exists and is a perfectly good class. I feel like a lot of this stuff could be implemented if the development team was willing to put in the extra legwork but I honestly can't fault them for not doing it.

That is such a weird way of calculating damage reduction. It's obviously a simple way of handling it but it doesn't lend itself to a nice and smooth curve at all. And, of course, it makes debuff effects ridiculously powerful with low amounts of def/res. It leads to the counter-intuitive situation where Luna/Flare works better against low def/res enemies rather than high ones. Also yeah I knew that about the whole damage tallying thing. I thought it was weird that each attack in a string was doing progressively more and more damage, so I checked the HP in the pause menu and learned that it actually wasn't doing that, which made sense. That being said, you can just look at the final displayed number for combat arts and the like. And I probably shouldn't have to mention this, but the switch has a recording capability we can use to replay and pause the art/magic in action just in case we miss the numbers in the heat of the moment.

For sure. Maddening is more of a New Game Plus difficulty that allows you to continue growing your characters against enemies who start out just as strong as Hard Endgame rather than an actual difficulty setting. It's the only way to play the game if you want to maximize your characters. That much was clear when Zoltan weapons were presented as endgame tier weapons that you could only get from S-Ranking maps, only for them to show up as regular drops in Maddening right from the start.

I've been playing nearly entirely without it, and the drops feel pretty great anyways. So I'm not sure. Obviously there are certain abilities I'd rather not see like Invert Offense/Defense, but I highly doubt Appraisal affects those things. And monster drops on Maddening seem to be rusted Regalia like 100% of the time. I see basically only Zoltan and Brave even without it, but I do mash through post-battle menus so maybe I just have tunnel vision because silvers don't even register on my radar (neither do braves to be honest). As for high level attributes, I rarely see any Lvl. 2 abilities anymore but they do appear now and then. Maybe they'd get wiped out entirely with Appraisal?

What's the whole deal with Savior of the Meek? Obviously its effectiveness is extremely nebulous and I haven't really seen much of a difference myself when equipping it, but do we actually know anything concrete about the skill?

Now I'm beginning to wonder what kind of multiplier effective damage is. This is much harder to test since you can't just hop into a mock battle and get results. Sure, there are combat arts that are effective vs all, but what other combat art are you going to compare them against? The better test is to compare weapons that are identical apart from effectiveness against an enemy who takes effective damage... while somehow keeping the level of advantage the same. Is that even possible? The main point of determining this is to see whether effective damage is additive or multiplicative. I think it's safe to say it's most likely multiplicative but I'm not gonna say that for sure until we test it. And, of course, if it does end up being multiplicative, that means that effective vs all combat arts like Atrocity become even better with more boosts. Edit: It might be better to test effective damage by allowing an enemy to hit the player instead. You can more finely control a player unit's bulk so that even two different classes have the same bulk, then simply have the enemy hit those two units and compare. This also works for controlling advantage, since you can have a rapier wielding enemy have 1 tier of advantage against a cav, then have a brigand with the same physical bulk be in the same scenario, just without the effective damage. Wow, I'm really talking myself into this idea. I'm probably gonna do this once I have some time.

For characters who rely on launching their foes and critical rushes (I'm thinking Ashe with tornado shot into his unique skill, but there are others) having advantage is basically a must on Maddening as no advantage (or disadvantage) typically allows the enemy to flip out of the launch and land back on their feet. I'm finding a lot of the time combat boils down to finding a combo that will easily smash a weak point, or a combo / single combat art that will just murder the enemy instantly. If you have to smash a weak point, then advantage is very helpful, otherwise, not as important. Gear is definitely very important as trying to whack away at enemies with non-upgraded weaponry will result in very little damage. As for the level difference, it's my belief that on Hard and Maddening, the intended level for your units is half the level of the enemy, though there's no evidence to support this view. It just seems right. I guess if I compared Normal mode enemy level to Hard mode enemy level, I could find out, but eh. It's not really something I need to have confirmed.

This has been tested by me by accident. During my testing of crits and Impossible Feat and buster, I realized that Shez was actually motivated during that time. Since all the multipliers appeared as they should, it can be assumed that the motivation boost applies multiplicatively. When I tested Lone Wolf for Felix, he had the same stats and same weapon, but did less damage, which is when I realized Shez had to be motivated. Here's a comparison of the two to just show how they differed.

Oh hell yeah. I'll go ahead and put this at the top with a note so that it's easy for everyone to see.

Like you said, it seems highly likely that they're categorized and that for the most part all regular abilities are in the same category of damage boosting, whereas stuff like motivation and crits are in different categories. The next thing to test would be personal abilities. Which I've done with Felix's Lone Wolf! Seems to be additive, which is what I suspected, at a +30% boost for level 3. Obviously my testing was slightly lacking in certain areas but I think it's good enough.