[Ranking each game by class: Lords]

8 hours ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

You can't argue these aren't "practical" ways to play the game.

I'm not saying that these aren't practical ways to play the game but that in a practical setting only one unit is going to be able to get a given resource, and that makes things complicated.

8 hours ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

If I wanted to give all my resources to Scathach instead, I can, and I can still win. More realistically, if I spread all the resources out in essentially random ways, I can easily do so and still win, as evidenced by the fact that I suspect this is in fact closer to how most people actually play FE4.

You could do this (and rate units based on how well they carry), but it's also possible to rate units in the context where Seliph gets most of the resources. This is how I rate them.

8 hours ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

You can certainly argue they're not "optimum", but I would shy away from only comparing characters in optimum situations (even if we can agree on what optimum means, which isn't a given in a single-player game), because it easily leads to circuluar logic. Taken to its extreme you end up being unable to talk about "less optimum" units at all. "Wil is not a good unit to invest in therefore we try to avoid giving him exp therefore Wil ends up underlevelled and terrible and therefore Wil sucks" is not a valid argument.

This isn't how an "optimum" run would talk about Wil, but in any case I don't assume optimal play. I do assume that the player is trying to beat the game quickly to be sure, and there are some instances where this means doing one specific thing. It's not always so black and white though; sometimes two mutually exclusive options are possible. Marcia vs. Jill in PoR or Fred vs. Robin in Awakening are examples where each offers unique advantages over the other and are competing for the same resources. One of them might technically be better than the other overall, but I'd consider both options because they are close enough to one another.

8 hours ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

In general I feel that the value of a unit is, in broad terms, equal to their performance relative to the investment required to achieve that performance. e.g. I think Seadall is the best unit in Engage because he doesn't take investment away from other units the way top combat units do, and even if someone could prove that [insert unit here] is the "objective" best recipient of a ton of favouritism that would make them more important to an "optimized" run than Seadall, I don't think that would make said unit nearly as good as Seadall. But this is a philosophical thing and I can see disagreeing.

Yeah, it's a philosophical thing, and I don't penalize a unit when they are the best use of a given resource. Seadall is a bit of an awkward example since he's a dancer, but I would note that it would be relevant to me if he can't be that most important unit and that he isn't able to make use of heavy investment.

10 hours ago, Jotari said:

I can see an argument like that if we're talking about a difficult early game, where stat thresholds can be pretty precisely, or the boots specifically if it let's you really do something you couldn't otherwise, such as having fliers be able to out move ballista range, but for the most part, I think the logic of "This unit can be really good with stat boosters" is a bit self defeating for "this is a really good unit". Because anyone can be made better with stat boosters. If you give Miledy full investment of stat boosters, she'll turn out amazing. If you give Oujay full investment of stat boosters he'll also turn out really good.

I would use the "makes good use of investment/stat boosters/etc." statement almost exclusively for a situation where it lets a unit do something unique or better than other units. I'm not sure about the Tiki comparsion; I'm not familiar with the game. Excluding boots though off the top of my head Kliff, Robin, and Jill in FE9/10 would be units that I consider to be "good investment targets" because they don't really do that well at base, but they do quickly snowball and become better than the rest of the army (even if other units in the army got the same resources instead) because of things that are unique to them with investment.

[Ranking each game by class: Lords]

1 minute ago, gnip said:

I don't fully agree here, though - I think a character can be credited if they're especially good at using a particular stat booster, or boosters in general, like FE1!Mars with his Provoke ability, FE10!Jill with her mobility, or FE6!Milady being able to double Mercenaries with an insta-promotion and a Speedwing. I do think that it's a bit silly to just assume that these units get these stat boosters, and just be compared as such vs. other characters without this kind of help. "Can use stat boosters well" is just another of those unit qualities that are hard to quantify, like "staff utility", "rescue utility", "thief utilty" and all that.

I was going to edit my last post to clarify, but this is also a good summary of my thoughts on the matter.

Quote

I do think that it's a bit silly to just assume that these units get these stat boosters, and just be compared as such vs. other characters without this kind of help.

This is something I'm conflicted about. I assume that Seliph gets a bunch of resources because it's overwhelmingly the fastest and most efficient way to beat FE4. I could even compare him to other characters given a similar level of resources and the result would be the same. The problem is that if I compare other units in this way then it wouldn't be an accurate representation of how the characters perform in a practical setting.

[Rate the Base-Game Units: Rating Redux]

16 minutes ago, Barren said:

Robin and Corrin with a magic boon can also pull it off from their respective games but only if the rng blesses you.

Camilla is also worth a mention. There are also instances in games like SoV where having a magic weapon on a physical unit can be pretty good. Leif has his Prf weapon in FE5, but I don't know that any of those are good long term.

[Ranking each game by class: Lords]

Just now, Jotari said:

Yeah, "good candidate for stat booster" is really saying "this character/class is lacking in key stats", which is actually a bad thing.

That's not exactly true. Miledy for example is a good candidate for the first pair of boots, but she isn't lacking in movement. Giving her that stat booster creates new strategies that wouldn't be possible without it; and that's the key to being a good candidate for a stat booster.

[Ranking each game by class: Cavaliers/Paladins]

22 minutes ago, Shadow Mir said:

Because the fact is, both have a low enough chance of working as to make relying on them impractical. Unless you have some means of making Sol reliable without Quixotic and Hoshidan Unity (which most units cannot legitimately get)...? Then I'm all ears. Because I refuse to believe something that basically is only effective in the best-case scenario is worthy of being called "reliable". And the fact it's complicated *really* does not help Sol's already flimsy case.

23 minutes ago, Shadow Mir said:

Ah, Sol tanking ninjas, aka, overrated garbage that relies on luck to stay alive because they're fragile and do little damage. Remember this?

If you  have some numbers to back up your claim I would be very interested. How much luck are they relying on to survive exactly in the situations you've come up with? Otherwise I will remain unconvinced; maybe I've just got really lucky over the playthroughs I've done, or alternatively I have found better setups than you have. The only thing that I'd fault Sol tanking for is that it's not as brain-dead easy to set up as it is in Awakening, and it's not quite as generally applicable.

43 minutes ago, Shadow Mir said:

That's exactly what I was talking about. 19 through 21 are chapters where he wants out of Paladin, but otherwise I'd rather keep the horse so he can function as a lure, as well as run if things go bad, which he cannot do as a hero because 6 move fails to outrun most units. Though in general I'm gonna keep other units nearby to assist.

I'm pretty sure that we've had vastly different experiences with Conquest. I don't need to run; my units are strong enough to not worry about that.

46 minutes ago, Shadow Mir said:

I know that, but I was excluding other factors as well. Also, honestly, how often do you actually pair up for extra skill?? Because 99.9 percent of the time, optimizing skill is not what I'm concerned about when I pair up for stat boosts. Second, when I see talk of reaching stat thresholds, it's always for other stats (and almost always for strength, magic, speed, or defense). Speaking of caps, I generally don't see units cap stats by the time the game ends without serious luck.

The skill pairup is partially incidental, but towards the end of the game the chosen carry will go above cap especially since just the tonic and Rally give +6. I've primarily used Corrin for this since I like to use her as my carry (and generally also gets fed stat boosters, etc), but I've seen someone try a Sol tanking Maid Peri and it kinda sorta worked, so anything is possible in Conquest I guess.

56 minutes ago, Shadow Mir said:

...speaking of, I remember you talking about Silas and Jakob, but the discussion centered solely on Xander because he's the only one of them I actually find useful. To be frank, I find Silas underwhelming - and I mean almost as bad as Alfred levels of underwhelming. At least Alfred doesn't have a personal that's a dead skill unless a better unit - and the main character at that - is at least half dead. I can't say much on Jakob because I don't use him - my Corrins are always male, and Jakob's personality is repulsive-as in hatesink levels of repulsive. And this is in a game where one of the playable characters is a killer who shows little, if any, remorse for her actions. And yes, I know this is late, but there ain't much to discuss as far as lords go.

The trick to using Silas effectively is to have him paired into a half health Corrin and take advantage of Demoiselle; he is actually quite a bit better with male Corrin since this adds a significant amount of bulk to go along with the damage. Corrin being at half health is a nonissue for the most part since you have full control over both getting him there and keeping him away from attacks that will kill him when Silas is doing his work. Pairing him into Silas is the easy solution though since Silas is basically just a meatshield then.

[Rate the Base-Game Units: Rating Redux]

1 hour ago, lenticular said:

The Lythos and Firene units arrive early which makes them much better as investment targets since they can really start to snowball sooner.

Which units do you have in mind specifically? Skimming through the old topics the only two Lythos/Firene units noted as being good investment targets that were rated above Brodia units were Chloe and Alear. Louis and Framme were seen as good early game units that fell off later on in the game, and Celine was seen in a similar light.

2 hours ago, lenticular said:

Bunet/Jean: I agree that Bunet is worse than Jean. I think that Jean both a. has a higher ceiling and b. is going to be good in more playstyles. And in terms of floor, while Bunet might have a slight edge there, I don't think that's cut and dry either. There are definitely use cases for "another early game staff user where I don't actually care about his stats". Not that many use cases, but there aren't that many for Bunet either.

If you care about opportunity cost then you're sacrificing that Miciaiah exp on a unit that's better and starts snowballing sooner. He doesn't really get going on his own merits; healing is pretty slow, and his main utility in my opinion (Chain Guard) helps even less for that. Bunet's floor is being a Reposition bot who can chunk enemies if you want to compare the two. If memory serves he can also one shot wyverns with a Hurricane Axe until later on in the game too. I'm also not confident that Jean would be good in more playstyles either since there's a lot of guesswork involved in trying to figure that one out.

[Rate the Base-Game Units: Rating Redux]

28 minutes ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

I was mostly thinking in comparison to Jean (the next lowest) or Anna: there are of course playstyles where those two will be worse than Bunet. But players who are into investing into growth units heavily will get a fair bit out of them; they do have legitimate advantages over others once they get rolling.

The issue in my mind is that it seems like an impossible task to come up with an objective aggregate rating based on every single playstyle. There are players who won't spend any time investing into weak units, and there's the opposite end of that spectrum of course, but those are only the two extremes. Theoretically speaking Anna should be better than Bunet for about twice as many people as Jean with a lot of assumptions thrown in, but even that's not so clear to me.

1 hour ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

I don't think there's any type of player who will view Bunet as anything better than vaguely passable filler for a window after he joins.

This is mostly how I view him, but the benefit to using Bunet as vaguely passable filler is that we can use his SP pool and map actions on things that would be wasteful to better units. Effectively we can use him to help snowball our other units without any real downside since we get good replacement units later on to fill in the gaps. This was a lot more compelling as an argument to me before the well made SP become a nonissue practically speaking, but it's still applicable to some degree.

12 hours ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

Chloe's big advantage on the midgame Elusia/Solm crew is that she has Canter and they do not. So in part 1 she is an outstanding combat unit, in part 2 she is still a great combat unit and has Canter over those who would otherwise be better, and in part 3 she's... passable.

Chloe can actually scale really well into the late game provided she doesn't level too much as a Wyvern. Mage Knight Chloe can perform similarly to Citrinne provided there isn't anyone else to use the Spirit Dust on. I still think that she's a little overrated, but getting into that would take more effort than is worth; I still think that she's vaguely in the right spot.

[Rate the Base-Game Units: Rating Redux]

2 hours ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

I think Bunet deserves to have the lowest score in the game taking into account different possible playstyles.

How are you determining this exactly?

[Rate the Base-Game Units: Rating Redux]

33 minutes ago, Wuzzy said:

Kagetsu - Imo he's definitely the 3rd best unit in the game. I know Kagetsu went through his "omg he's busted" phase and we are on the "overrated" phase but what makes him stand out amongst other physical attackers is he has access to Parthia for 2 Chapters before Panette and Merrin which allows him to start his snowball much earlier.

His lack of flight prevents him from snowballing in chapter 12 in my experience. I might be able to see him starting to snowball in chapter 13, but I like to give Lyn to Ivy and glue my Bonded Shield to her since I don't bother memorizing what's in the dark and she has 1-2 range to wreck just about everything on the map iirc. That is to say I think that there is an argument to be made between him and Panette. I largely agree with your points otherwise. I'm a little annoyed that I forgot to mention Chloe myself though.

[Rate the Base-Game Units: Rating Redux]

At a glance Citrinne's rating stands out the most as being too low in my opinion. Getting her speed up to par takes investment to be sure, but a lot of the units around her are just not able to get the same level of performance. She's a great Bonded Shield target and can comfortably hit one round benchmarks against Maddening enemies throughout the game. Celine for example only has 4 more speed with 8 less magic at ilvl 30 in the same class, and the magic is a lot harder to fix. If Vidamine was a good class or if Celine was really good early on I could see the difference, but neither is true in my experience. That's just one example though; there are a lot of other characters rated higher that outperform her. I think that I gave her a 7 originally, and I could see myself upping that by a point now.

Yunaka: I recently used Yunaka along with a lot of terrible units. I found a Steel Dagger from the well that I forged into a Silver early. It took her a little while to start doubling and one rounding with it, but she quickly became one of my best units. She ended up reclassing into Mage Knight and becoming my secondary magic carry. I'm not really opposed to the rating she got, but I have a better impression of her after this. It does take some effort to get her out of her base class though.

Diamant: I just want to use this as an excuse to talk about why Diamant has Sol with a dex cap of 23. I have a strong suspicion that his dex cap was balanced around a mounted Instruct and Dex+5. That amount of dex is enough to make it somewhat reliable with Roy or Ike helping his survivability, but it's a lot of investment for a questionable amount of gain, and dex instruct is otherwise pretty useless.

Amber: Dude has one of the best strength stats which makes him a great Lyn user or Emblem spammer; in my mind he's a lot better than most of the units around him who have middling stats everywhere and won't do as much with investment. Generally speaking most units stink without investment too, so I think that it's perfectly fair to compare units when they have a proper build and the like.

Bunet: He's a bad unit, but I like him more than growth units. They take effort to get anywhere and are worse than units that take none to train. Bunet while being bad at least can at least be a positive when deployed without having a training arc.

[Rate the Engage DLC Unit]

I haven't used Gregory or Madeline yet, so my rating of these is somewhat speculative. Their speed stats are abhorrent, and while it's easy to fix speed to some degree this is a little too slow in my opinion. Madeline is a tank that can only be recruited past the point where I find raw tanking to be useful because we have emblems to perform that utility instead. I could imagine using her for some emblem attack or random utility with her huge SP pool in a similar way to Bunet, but past that I just don't like her stats. Gregory not having a speed stat really hurts his ability to deal damage; if I'm doing my math right it's 3 less than Citrinne at the same internal level wit a lower growth. She can get to a point where she's doubling just about everything, but it is close to not working, so my guess is that Gregory has a harder time of it and isn't very good as a result.

I'll give Gregory a 2.5 and Madeline a 3.5. The starting SP is nice for both, but I do think that this is a little more valuable on a physical class with better access to strong emblem attacks.

Zelestia (8/10)

From what I remember it's questionable if Soulblade is good or not. Otherwise She's really fast and is a flying mage, so she's like Ivy without the overkill magic. She's fast enough to afford to use a damage skill or Starsphere instead of Speed+5. She can technically use physical weapons too, but I'd focus on that magic stat.

Rafal: (7.5/10)

I'm the least sure of this one since I just stuck Byleth on him and used him as a Rally bot. His personal seems interesting, but it's more trouble than is ideal for a Wrath/Vantage build in my opinion. His starting strength looks really impressive though, and unless I'm mistaken he can reclass into something good and fix his speed in a similar way to Amber to become the primary physical carry if there isn't someone else doing that already.

Nel: (7/10)

Nel feels a lot like Chloe to me since she's really fast and can have problems dealing damage. She probably works best as a Mage/Griffin Knight built similarly to Chloe, but I haven't tried this. I went with Paladin and Camilla if I remember correctly which was also decent, but the DLC offers so much that it's hard for any unit to be bad.

If I didn't mention one of the personal skills it's because I didn't find it interesting. I'm also assuming they get recruited at around chapter 16-18 or so. It's possible to play through the DLC on easy mode and get them by chapter 8 or something, and in that case I would bump their ratings up by quite a lot.

[Ranking each game by class: Wyverns]

15 hours ago, Cysx said:

Okay. Well, with rescue spam it really is quite easy(even from base once you have buyable rescues, Cleric 10 Sage 10 Falcon 5 could be done in about five chapters), and can simplify the final battle a good bunch.

I'm sure that it's easy, but I like to be as lazy as possible when I can help it 😄.

[Ranking each game by class: Wyverns]

29 minutes ago, Cysx said:

The actual difference would be, why... don't you have Rally speed, exactly ? It's ridiculously easy to get on Lissa.

I don't have my save file on hand anymore to see what level Lissa ended up at (she got some exp), but the simple answer is that I didn't bother training anyone other than Chrom or Fred and stopped deploying anyone else as soon as I was able to.

29 minutes ago, Cysx said:

Chrom as a pure pairup tends not to reach 30 speed from my experience. And there's definitely the possibility of him getting screwed. Did you use him as an active unit a lot ?

I managed to get Chrom to 11?>Archer 10>Sniper 10 > Paladin 10>Bow Knight. My Chrom actually did get a little speed screwed, but there should be enough leeway with Speedwings most of the time. I mostly fed him bosses with a Longbow when he was an Archer/Sniper, but in retrospect I could have fed him more. I was winging it, so I didn't realize that I should level him until halfway into the run.

[Ranking each game by class: Wyverns]

1 hour ago, Cysx said:

You could always make Fred a Paladin for +3 cap, because a +30 speed Chrom is a pretty tall ask.

But yes it generally has to be a two turns, so you have to calculate according to that. You can either do a rescue chain (it's possible with base Libra, Anna and Olivia), or just bank everything on turn 2.

 

39 +1 (defender) +2 (speed tonic) +3 (30 speed chrom) + 3 (bk pairup) +2 (A support)

This was to reach 50 speed. Paladin Fred maxes at 38, so I'm not sure where I would get the extra speed with that class. Getting Chrom to 30 speed shouldn't be too bad. I haven't looked at averages, but I had him reach 32 by the end of the game. (edit: seems like he averages 31 with the pathing I took? I used a few speedwing to help him out though.)

[Ranking each game by class: Wyverns]

1 minute ago, Cysx said:

You really don't, however it is true that it's one of the few chapters where you cannot just rush in and win without taking some time looking at numbers. Definitely helps to have forged brave weaponry, so if you've spent all your money already...

If Fred is the only unit we actively train then we want to have Chrom hit 30 speed so that Fred can quad with the Brave Axe. The dual strike damage also helps a lot since Grima has Pavise and Dragonskin. I guess I could be missing something, but it's hard to imagine Fred surviving for very long if the map doesn't end quickly.

[Ranking each game by class: Lords]

48 minutes ago, Samu_77 said:

Is it fair to credit the necessity of Seizing a map as a positive for a unit? Because I personally only see it as a negative thing. If the objective was anything else then Roy I feel would become a lot better because he is free to do other things then make his way to the Throne each time, for example a defeat boss map would give him a lot more freedom on the battlefield. I agree that it makes them more important but I wouldn't necessarily say that makes them better.

"Lyn is a better unit than Robin because I need her to progress the game" is an argument I could make if I chose to ascribe value to the seize mechanic when ranking units. I don't do this primarily because I find that it's a lame way to compare units, but it's also not really clear how much credit we should give a unit for this. On the other hand the combat contributions or resources allocated to a unit in order to achieve that goal are all fair game for me; Seliph probably being the best example of this.

[Ranking each game by class: Lords]

29 minutes ago, Jotari said:

Oh, no, Ephraim is a fantastic combat unit. He'd have the reputation of Ike or Hector if it wasn't for the fact that he joins later and exists in the same game as Seth.

That's kind of what I was getting at. He might have fantastic combat stats, but he doesn't have a mount until chapter 16 where we have Warp and carries with better stats to clear the game with. He's also even less likely to get going on Eirika route.

edit: I can definitely see him being higher up if you play the game differently and/or value different things too. I remember people praising him as the next coming of Sigurd on a few websites back in the day, and it's not hard to see why.

[Ranking each game by class: Lords]

Top: FE4

Sigurd and Seliph belong a tier above everyone else in my opinion. Sigurd can practically solo his own campaign, and the best course of action in part 2 is to get Seliph a horse ASAP so that he can rush objectives and practically do the exact same thing.

High: Fates, FE10

I don't want to create a separate tier for Ike alone, but he's definitely worse than Corrin. He's overshadowed by Haar, but he can comfortably kill just about everything that Haar doesn't. I seem to remember transfer bonuses being important for him, but I don't know that he'd be a whole lot worse without them. Corrin can do just about everything, but they're also slightly overshadowed by another unit depending on the route.

Mid: FE5, FE9, Engage

Leif is pretty useful as a combat unit through Manster, but he kind of falls off after that when Thracia becomes more about spamming staves.

Alear has a fantastic personal, but they're otherwise unimpressive. I am pretty sure I'd think much less of Alear if it wasn't for the fact that they're the main character. It's what I like to call lord privilege; Alear is force deployed in a game where deployment slots are valuable, so it's a good idea to provide them with resources so that they can contribute. It also helps that they're required to complete chapter 11, so I always have them in a class to help clear the chapter more quickly. Alear also has a fantastic personal; it's often 6 additional damage, and it can even be more with a good engage attack.

Ike is similar to Alear in a way. He's the best option for dealing with Ashnard at the end of the game, and he's also required in order to seize several maps. There's also no real downside to feeding him a ton of bonus experience to help him along since FE9 is a resource rich game outside of the Japanese version. He might not technically have great attributes, but he's the only footlocked unit that's going to see any combat (even if it's just at 1 range) if we're going at the pace of mounted units.

Low: FE7, 8

Eirika is pretty bad from what I remember. I don't remember exactly how good Ephraim is, but I'm assuming that it's easier to just focus on the carries and avoid using him as a primary combat unit. If that's the case he kind of gets left in the dust even if his growths are good. The lords in FE7 are mostly awful. Lyn is one of the worst units in the game. Eliwood is alright with his personal for a while, but I usually bench him unless he's above average and starts snowballing a little. He's also limited with his lack of 1-2 range until promotion. Hector has mobility issues even if his combat is good. I don't actually know that his combat holds up anyway since he promotes rather late.

Bottom: FE6

Roy is really bad and promotes late too; I don't feel the need to elaborate. I find this to be a fun strategic component to FE6 to be sure though.

Awakening:

I am not sure if Robin counts or not, but they probably belong below Sigurd in the top tier or at the top of the high tier. They are one of the best carries for Lunatic (I'm of the opinion that Freddy is a little better for a Lunatic solo, but Robin is a close second), and they're probably the best unit in Lunatic+. Robin is also the best parent for just about anyone. Lucina depends a lot on her mother, but she can be anywhere from a top tier unit after a paralogue or two to being a little too annoying to train without copious amounts of stat boosters. I have no idea about Chrom; he's just too good as a backpack, so I've never trained him seriously. I'm guessing that he can become a Lunatic carry without too much effort, but I have no idea about Lunatic+.

[Ranking each game by class: Wyverns]

6 hours ago, Shadow Mir said:

On the subject of Chrom, you're gonna need a good Chrom for Grima, as otherwise you get an unwinnable scenario as anything with staves heals them (special mention to Sages and War Monks for Healtouch, and Tomefaire in the former case). I saw one end up choking at the end because of this; they couldn't damage Grima at all. Not that that mattered; what did them in was getting surrounded by Grimleal soldiers.

Yeah, Chrom is going to get a lot of incidental experience just from being the backpack the whole run, but it's also a good idea to feed him stat boosters and boss kills to help against Grima.

[Ranking each game by class: Wyverns]

11 hours ago, Samu_77 said:

Okay, but for starters, Arena Abuse isn't a great argument, it may be true that Zeiss would end up better then a lot other units with Arena abuse because he has naturally great traits (Canto Rescue, high defense, Flight) and has good growths, I can arena or boss abuse anybody in this game and have an absolute monster that steamrolls through the game. 

There's a difference between abusing the arena for a few hundred turns and using it for a handful of turns while everyone else is off clearing the map; I'd assume that it's more of the latter.

[Ranking each game by class: Wyverns]

36 minutes ago, Shadow Mir said:

And Robin is literally the only unit that can solo Awakening.

Freddy can solo Lunatic also, though it's probably better to call it carry since technically Chrom is helping.

[Rate the Unit: Intermission]

I would propose having one single topic to discuss/rate the DLC characters and separating their ratings from the other units. I'm not sure if anyone else would be interested in this, but it's what makes the most sense to me at the moment. The only real problem I have in rating the units is that I haven't used the characters more than once, and I'm not sure that triangle attack has the DLC units available which is how I was looking at benchmarks beforehand. This might be off-topic, but it would also be neat to have a topic afterwards to discuss the units that some of us missed or the unit rankings in general; I didn't comment on many of the earlier units, and I've changed my mind on a character or two in the meantime. I'm not sure that there's enough to warrant individual character revision threads.

[Ranking each game by class: Wyverns]

30 minutes ago, SnowFire said:

By the time Cormag joins, you could already have a monster Vanessa rolling through (even excluding Seth cheese!) or a decent Tana.  Mentioned it on the Pegasus Knight thread, but I don't find flying utility quite as helpful in FE8 as some other games in the series.  Lots of enemies that just politely stand around waiting to get baited without too much need to hurry up, barring stuff like the hatching Gorgon eggs map.

It really depends on the context of the discussion here. In an "efficiency" setting Cormag gets the nod because there isn't a training arc and we don't have to spend the time to get the Elysian Whip in chapter 8. From what I understand Eirika route needs a promoted flyer asap, and by the time we get Cormag we've already used all of our resources. I'm guessing that this this the angle that Whisky is taking whereas turns and the like aren't as much of a concern for you.

2 hours ago, Whisky said:

It does still seem pretty good with pretty solid stats and flight, but only 1 more move than infantry units in this game and no Rescue/Drop or Cantó. I promoted Chloe to Wyvern Rider in my Maddening run and that worked out great. It’s still good, it just doesn’t seem nearly as dominant as it is in other games to me.

My issue with wyverns in Engage is the lack of a good 1-2 range weapon without Roy. If it wasn't for that I think that they'd still be the best class in the game without question. Micaiah (and Sigurd to some degree) also has a notable impact when she's around because then the movement isn't quite as important; I've seen Generals being used to hit one shot breakpoints in an LTC for example.

Out of curiosity did you dump all of your early game stat boosters into Chloe? I remember this being the meta early on in Engage; I'm not sure whether it is or not now though.

[Rate the DLC-Unit 1 (37): Nel]

4 hours ago, Imuabicus der Fertige said:

 what do the good people fo the forest, think about rating the DLC boys n girls with the DLC rings and bracelets?

It makes the most sense, but I'd also have to wonder when we can assume that the DLC characters get recruited. They're pretty broken if we play through the Xenologue on Normal just to have them for the main game on Maddening if the rest of the DLC doesn't break the game already.

[Rate the Unit 36: Anna]

2/10

Like Jean she's a growth unit that is terrible to start, but she doesn't have any of the staff or Qi Adept utility. On Maddening she kind of needs to have Micaiah to get to promotion. Once there she can go in Warrior with a Radiant Bow, but I'm a fan of reclassing her into Mage Knight. By the end of the game she's going to have a monster magic and speed stat, so she can be a fantastic Bonded Shield target once she gets going. I'm kind of torn because I want to give her a higher rating than Jean because I feel like she gets going faster, but it's hard to ignore the fact that we get a lot of ready to go units that don't need to spend time self improving before they're a competent member of the team. To be clear though the rating has more to do with her start than potential; I think that growth units are fun and rather easy to train in this game.

Her personal isn't very good with proper money management. In a vacuum having her as the main magic carry nets us enough kills to generate a decent amount of money I think, but the extra money isn't buying anything useful in my experience.