Burklight

I think dismissed battalions can be hired from the vendor guy.

Probably. Especially if you plan on doing future NG+ runs. QR is the single most busted ability in the entire game, and getting it at level 1 is insane. I also think there's value in general getting gender locked skills for Byleth in case you do F!Byleth on your next clear, because you can unlock stuff you normally couldn't get with grade renown.

It's still good, just not for the reason you're giving. WM is meant to be used with killer weapons IMO. QR gives you double attack on enemy phase while your HP is over 50%, so you always get two attacks with 50~70% crit rate. Gauntlets on player phase give you the same chances for a crit kill before the enemy can even counter attack, and vantage gives you a 50~70% crit one shot potential on enemy phase when you take enough damage for QR to fall off. And before anyone asks, 20% crit from WM passive + ~30% from killer weapon + base crit + 10 because you probably S ranked gauntlets or axes by this point.

I honestly don't think the auxiliary battles or the turn wheel or divine pulse or whatever they're calling this iteration of it is a problem, I think it's a symptom. If you're the game developer attempting to make a meaning difficulty curve, it's going to be basically impossible in a game like this where you have no idea what the player is going to do at the time of development because of how many choices you know you're going to give the player. So what you do instead is lean on the side of making it on the more difficult end, but then throw in auxiliary battles and a turn wheel as a lazy design solution in case you effed up and made it too hard.

I feel like this is a false dichotomy. The real choice should be Bow Knight or War Master. The only thing Sword Master does better than War Master is fewer requirements. It has less move, less crit, a worse class skill, and only one weapon type. Gauntlets are also quite good at getting around any speed issues caused by his relic mid game, and QR fixes the same problem for Axes late game.

A thing I did with Ingrid to fix her objectively mediocre str on my most recent BL run is to train her in Axes and Armor to C~B range. You want to get Axes anyway for WK at 20, but also because a 40~60% pass chance at fortress knight at level 20 fixes her bases enough to offset her growths(17 str and defense). You end up getting a higher armor rank than you'd probably want, particularly because she's fast enough that the -3 weight doesn't really help her, but it isn't so far out of the way that this is an unreasonable amount of time.

If your late game plan is to have him as a GL, I think it might actually be worth while to try and get his lance rank to S+. Since GL is basically sacrificing mobility for far more forgiving weapon ranks and raw stats, it seems like doing a full tunnel vision on lance rank for the +5 damage might actually be worth it. You only need a C in authority to use his OPAF battalion, and a B in riding to get paladin for agies.

I think the reason HP seems underwhelming, at least compared to a lot of previous games, is that attack in general is a lot higher. The base stats at level 1 for attack for most units is close to double what it would have been in say....FE7. Then add in all the +5 class skills and battalions and suddenly, hp and defense is somewhat consistent with previous games, but attack is so much higher it's laughable.

I generally think WL Sylvain is best, but there is a pretty solid reason to go paladin that I haven't seen anyone make yet, and that's his A rank lance ability "Swift Strikes." Lancefair gives you straight up +10 damage to that, which is quite strong. I don't think he gets lancefair in any other class.

Post time skip passive.

I don't even think it's the "next" attack. It's the first attack after combat ends. I've seen him take counter attacks from Falling Star before. I'm honestly not sure there's any good uses for it, especially compared to Edelgard and Dimitri's relic abilities.

I think I finally figured out the disconnect, so let me try and fill you in. All that "data" and stuff you posted only applies if we're talking about the meta of the actual game. That has no place in threads like this where the forum posting has a totally different meta. See, because you posted this on forums, gauntlets are bad because WL can't use them. In an Optimal Play™ run, which consists of 8 WLs jerking each other off while Lys warps your 9th WL to one shot the boss, gauntlets never get used.

Gauntlets can't be used by the only class I acknowledge as being meta viable in game of trolling this internet forum. They're totally viable in the actual game, tho. Pretty solid there.

I don't see how gauntlets are significantly worse than other melee weapon types. The two main uses for them are... A) Slow units who cant double without them, thus not doubling on enemy phase is moot because they weren't going to anyway (Dedue, Raphael) or B) Very fast units with high damage who probably kill on enemy phase anyway, but use gauntlets for the cost effective brave effect (Felix, Byleth) The main argument I'd have against them is that maybe your faster units don't have enough str to kill on enemy phase without a stronger weapon, but without the str you probably aren't going to double with an axe or lance....so sometimes swords are better for this use case.

IIRC, the reason DF was so broken in echos was the fact that they took half damage from magic in a game where no one had a resistance growth. It makes sense to nerf that in TH because people have resistance now...but why nerf the rest of it? I didn't understand why they nerfed it either.

A few things off the top of my head... 1. I want a way to view the victory conditions during the battle prep screen. As far as I'm aware, you cant actually view it until the chapter starts. 2. For the monetary, I want to be able to do faculty training through a menu that lists all available NPCs so I don't have to run around and talk to the same 4 people every week.

I'm fairly sure Bernie's crest works the same way adapt did in previous games, meaning it wouldn't work with a brave weapon or gauntlets. My reasoning for this is, again, The Immovable One has the same crest, and I've seen it proc on his QR attacks, giving him 3 attacks instead of the usual 2 from QR. Meaning the extra hit had to be like a brave effect because they already had the second round of combat. I'm hoping that logic actually makes sense, as I'm not sure I can clarify it better.

I have a theory that the fifth story arc is going to be one where Jeralt doesn't die. That way you would never enter the Sealed Forest, which would give Sothis more time to figure out who she is and be playable later, and you'd get Jeralt as a playable character. I don't understand what other purpose there would be to giving him affection points from dialogue options while having zero supports if they don't plan on making him playable.

I did forget about Spear of Assal. It's also possibly I'm just very unlucky with hit rates and crit counters, but I found quite often that things like a brave bow (which I did specifically try to use to kill him) had a hit rate <60%, which isn't going to ORKO fairly often (it didn't for me), and a lot of my fliers couldn't take a crit on counter attack from him without dying, and his crit was somewhere around 35% IIRC. These are pretty easy numbers to get a desired result if you're willing to divine pulse every time you get a 35% crit on CA, but I assumed that was off the table for discussions like this.

Did you even read my entire post? I'm not discounting movement and canto at all, it's clearly strong, and it's always been strong. It is, however, not the only thing you're going to need. There are enough edge cases where having more killing power is better than having movement. And I'm glad you brought up the Enbar map, because that's a fairly good example. How are you instantly killing Death Knight with Claude without turn wheel abusing for a crit or having him grossly overleveled? None of my fliers had the firepower to one round that thing, but my Felix WM ate him alive.

I'm not going to dig out specific quotes from the past page, but I do think it's interesting that a very common theme is "WL is better than X because it has more move and the fact that it does inferior damage isn't an issue because everything dies anyway" and yet no one brings up the fact that movement isn't really a limiting factor in this game because of stride and warp. The exact same point can be made in reverse...."WL struggles to kill 5-10% of likely enemies, WM doesn't struggle to kill anything, and the extra movement doesn't matter because stride and warp." See how that logic works? You can easily go down and point out a several cases where the movement matters, but it's every bit as easy to point out just as many cases where the damage matters and the movement doesn't.

IIRC, you get Indech Sword Fighters from the "Oil and Water" paralogue.

Gauntlets are an excellent choice against fast units with crappy defense because they are quite accurate, and the fact that they have no might doesn't matter against fast units with crappy defense.

25~30% crit is a fairly reasonable pseudo defense when layered with mediocre avoid and vantage. I'm going to test some of this stuff tonight. I'll post anything weird.

Have you personally seen them not mesh well together? Or are you just going by the descriptions? Because some of the combat in this game is coded in such a way that it wouldn't surprise me if the game treated Vantage as a player phase initiate combat that would make Desperation work.