AxelVDP

if she'd have 35 mag at level 40, at level 35 she should have 2-3 points less on average, that's what he meant, and that even with 32-33 mag she can still kill some stuff

Dedue's tanking abilities are still rock solid in the endgame, he still takes like 0 dmg from assassins and most other enemy types, he even manages to survive 1-2 berserk rounds (his worst non mage matchup) (this is assuming you're using him in an armored class) (and yes, I'm talking NG maddening) If only BL endgame was not so chock full of mages Dedue would still be amazing there Lorenz might have lower magic bases than other mages, but he easily makes up for it by having: - a personal skill which gives free +2 extra dmg - super high power spells (learns ragnarok early at B reason and sagittae at C) (and between this 2 points here he already outdamages most mages barring maybe Lysithea, while still being accurate to boot) - the easiest path to dark knight of all mages - he also has his crest which occasionally boosts his firepower too (not really a huge help since it's hard to plan on randomness but it's still there)

I don't get why you completely ignored the rest of my post but: if you're using gremory Dorothea that means you're actually attacking sometimes, which means not having meteor equipped thus no accuracy bonuses (yes, you can work around this because you don't always need the extra bonuses), as a dancer, this is basically never the case. (would be a non problem if you could trade magic equips like you could with weapon but alas) Meteor will not be one hit koing enemies on maddening, you're going to use it mostly to chip away scary enemies or finish off enemies safely. both thing can be accomplished by dancing in her case, with basically the same degree of success. Having dancer's 6 move vs gremory's 5 move means you're also extending your linked bonus range, getting more utility out of it. and no, I don't think I'm doing something wrong if on some maps there are some turns where your dancer can't do a useful dance. your team should be composed by lots of mounted units, it's not uncommon that you should spread out your army to seize objectives quickly (the term objective is used loosely here, can mean killing some siege user, grabbing some chests, stop someone from escaping etc). a dancer simply can't keep up at all times if you're not playing to conservatively. physic access also gives you more flexibility in what strategies you can do, besides giving you an useful action while dancing would be impossible or impractical. she's not going to be your healer anyway so you're not robbing your team of an useful physic user either. that aside, I do agree with your reasonings of using your weaker units to be dancers (even tho I might not necessarily 100% agree with your actual picks), though I feel like you're overstating the importance of chapter13 btw, my arguments are based on some kind of "standard" efficient play, not LTC in a LTC setting I could see your arguments being more valid overall

Dorothea is easily one of the best dancer (if not the best) precisely because of meteor and physics lol meteor gives basically your entire party linked attack bonuses when equipped, so Dorothea gets double utility, dancing AND granting extra accuracy to all of your units, no other unit can (easily) fulfill this role. this is especially useful since by the endgame most units will have better mov than your dancer, meaning that there will be situations where your dancer would not get to be useful for a turn or so. with meteor linked attacks and physics your dancer is always relevant in the battlefield the fact that you don't get to use Dorothea as a combat unit with 2 meteor usages instead of 1 is easily a worthy tradeoff, she is not a great combat unit. meteor won't likely orko any unit on maddening, and guess what, by dancing you get another unit to basically chip/finish off another unit instead of you meteoring in the first place !_! also, you keep dismissing logical arguments presented to you with statements like "a turd is a turd!" "I have better things to do with my activity points!" (that, unless you are trying to get a severely underlevelled/charm screwed unit to be your dancer won't even be necessary in the first place) where are YOUR arguments? who would YOU make a dancer and WHY? what do YOU use your activity points for? (besides activity points are super abbundant once you reach the midgame)

if anything, Anna is a repurposed Manuela (similar proficiencies, basically the same growths, rescue instead of warp, meteor instead of bolting) no support also means no linked attack bonuses

???? what is it you don't understand in: "Frozen Lance is often the only way your mage can finish off / one round an enemy, you obviously use it only when safe and/or in conjunction with canto", you obviously don't go attacking enemies that can retaliate back, also frozen lance is actually not great on armor dudes, for them it's better to use magic that will double them, I don't have the calc on top of my head but I'm pretty sure you're not going to orko armors with frozen lance due to their high HP, but you definetly can orko other types of enemies like thieves (assuming obviously fiendish blow), a feat which other spells cannot achieve in the midgame also, higher accuracy than spells, which if you're using dark magic/blizzard (aka: hubert/marianne) is very important (and all the previously listed benefits) I'm not arguing you should turn all your mages into paladins and go around frozen lancing everything, there's obviously a tradeoff in utility when going this route, just saying that this option is heavily underrated and that they outperform basic mages in some situations

Frozen Lance is often the only way your mage can finish off / one round an enemy, you obviously use it only when safe and/or in conjunction with canto. Having your mage in a mounted class can sometimes be more beneficial than keeping it in a standard mage class (talking about mid game without master classes), they keep up with the rest of the army and can provide good support through gambits+canto and repositional combat arts, and can still nuke stuff even harder with Frozen Lance (also they can chip away enemy mages with physical attacks if need be)

my dudes frozen lance is a pretty bonker combat art, your mages won't be doubling anyway and this combat art outdamages most spells it also helps that hubert/marianne will have to train their lance rank anyway to get into a cavalry master class and that mages do not need their 3 combat art slots anyway

Considering that even average battallions give 5-6 extra atk + other bonuses like extra prt/hit/avoid... you should reach the answer on your own

remember: you can (and you should) cook in the monastery to give everyone +2/3 speed every month, only 2 story missions iirc don't have access to atleast +2 speed from cooking attack speed formula is also super easy, it's just 1 less weight (=extra AS) every 5 point of STR you have

Wyvern is amazing but I don't really fancy the idea of having shit battallions on half of my team, especially when gambits are also just as broken as wyverns. imo Dedue is overall more useful as a designated tank rather than ""wasting"" a wyvern slot edit: I don't mean it as a "don't use wyverns" before this causes confusion lol, just saying that you probably don't need more than 5-6 flying units in your team especially considering the lack of flying battallions in a ng setting

Dedue can easily become a great knight even with a riding weakness, since the lowest riding requirement is C and he has strengths in lances+axes. In general, I really dislike fortress knight low move in the late game where the rest of your team is riding something, you can't tank in the frontlines if you're always lagging behind. Early to mid game they are useable tho. Gilbert has also easy access to great knight (it's basically free), but has slightly less tanking potential than Dedue, he'll still take lotsa damage if you don't invest him in some extra way (def stat boosters/authority training asap to give him good prt battallions), he also has an easy time getting to wyvern rider/lord, if you so fancy, but that kinda depends on your team composition

assassins and grapplers have a hidden bonus in that they do not get mov penalties by forests/thickets, this alongside the 6 mov makes them the most mobile infantry classes also, I don't really agree with the list but whatever (bow knights so low lol)

you run wyvern (or paladin) annette for a flying rally user with canto (and this is hardly a gimmick), being able to hit like a truck is just a great bonus

I'm sorry if I misunderstood the question in the battle prep menu you can use the map option and hover on units and by pressing X you can see their stats, if that's what you did not know

go into battle and check the enemy stats? you can use stat boosters while in battle prep

I honestly used training weapons up to the endgame, especially training axes, it honestly depends on your units growths, if you happen to be lucky with your str and speed growths you can easily move on to iron weapons, you should decide your weapon loadout based on the stats of the units you're facing. steel weapons are still good to have around for the extra dmg output with combat arts in situations where you would be doubled anyway or that you don't get targeted in enemy phase the same reasoning goes for your stat boosters, you should give them to units who need to reach certain benchmarks (check enemy stats). for non speed/dex/cha stats I find it better to give the stat boosters to someone who has already decent stat in that area (random example: you get way more value from a def boosting item if you give it to dedue so that he takes 3x2 dmg instead of 5x2 instead that giving the same def booster to one unit with a shaky defence who gets killed anyway)

use units with high res, he hits on the magic side he did piss poor dmg vs my linhardt (it also helps that he takes more magic dmg aswell)

sword+axes* I don't think any character focuses on a movement type (or armor for that matter). Ingrid starts at higher flying rank only because the game gives you the minimum rank requirement for the class they are in, not because she actively trains in it

- your avoid stat is tied to your speed, so you want to use speedy characters as avoid tanks - you'll obviously need decent proficiencies to get into a flying class - ferdinand and post skip dimitri have their personal skill that boosts avoid at max hp - bonus points if you have good Cha (enemy gambits will have worse hit vs you) and Luck (iirc gives you better avoid vs magic attacks) - if you're planning on playing NG+ you could think about using the dancer class exclusive ability of sword avoid +20 on the character you're planning to make an avoid tank (I would not recommend sacrificing your dancer slot for this in a regular playthrough)

at least in the last BL chapter, they did not

the first 10% exp bonus I got fairly early, around timeskip I believe, second one yes, I got late, around the last 3-4 chapters iirc and yes, quests do give a fair ammount of renown and no, I never grinded reinforcements, lol. I played fairly "normal", I never warp cheesed maps so I usually fought most enemies and always went for every optional objective (saving all green units (besides gilbert in chapter 5), collect all chests, kill death knight at every encounter, stuff like this I mean), so yes I did not really try to finish in the least ammount of turns, but I don't think I turtled much either (outside of the starting chapters) Probably the biggest difference was the fact that I always took care of abusing Byleth's personal whenever possible, and I did a lot of paralogues My turn count was intro 8 - ch1 18 - ch2 27 - ch3 13 - ch4 22 - ch5 30 (goddamn gilbert aggroed the entire map and had to take it slow) - dedue paralogue 11 - ch6 21 turns - lorenz paralogue 9 - sylvain paralogue 11 - ch7 13 - ingrid paralogue 25 - felix paralogue 8 - sothis paralogue 14 - ch8 7 - hanneman+manuela paralogue 17 - alois+shamir paralogue 9 - ch9 6 - flayn+sethet paralogue 11 - ashe paralogue 7 - ch10 11 - ch11 12 - ch12 9 - ch13 24 (first post skip chapter) - ch14 8 - annette+gilber paralogue 15 - ch15 6 - bernadetta+petra paralogue 20 (never trained both units) - mercedes+caspar paralogue 17 (never used caspar) - marianne paralogue 14 - rhea paralogue 11 - ch16 14 - ch17 13 - ch18 18 - dimitri paralogue 12 - ch19 5 - ch20 19 - ch21 21 - ch22 12 compacted just for story chapters: (intro 8 ) 18 27 13 22 30 21 13 7 6 11 12 9 24 8 6 14 13 18 5 19 21 12 edit: I did not realize I did that many paralogues (16 in total) not stellar but does not look too turtly to me I grinded Dedue and Gilbert weapon ranks in 2 aux battles towards the end (abusing broken lance + enemy fortress knights, that's why they have S+ in heavy armor), but that's about it, every other weapon rank I got normally with no grinding or cheese

I assume you're talking about me, and I can assure you, I did not grind in the slightest, in fact I purposedly levelled up other units aside from my main team because I had resources to spare and did not want to get overlevelled. As I wrote in the other topic, I basically never did aux battles. I did get the 10% exp bonus on 2 statues tho. also the siege mages were certainly a surprise but you just need to use retribution on Ingrid/Dimitri and leave the rest of your team out of range. then they suicide by themselves lol (this is why I actually rate Ingrid quite high, she is an excellent mage killer, and there are tons of mages in BL lategame)

nope, no grinding, only aux battles I did were when I had extra activity points after doing all my paralogues/quest battles (example, at A+ I could do 3 battles a week, if I had just 1 paralogue left to do I'd do it and then 2 aux battles, I never went out of my way to do them), tho I did use 2 of those aux battles to grind Dedue/Gilbert weapon ranks (vs enemy fortress knights with a broken lance)

Combat art slots are not exactly a tight resource lol, most of the time I'd say you'll just need 2 combat art per battle (especially on characters such as Ashe, bow and axe guys rarely need lots of combat arts), so Deadeye is not occupying a slot that could be used for something else, and having the option of hitting at up to 5 range (to aggro stuff, to potentially debuff with seal skills, etc) can be useful on every map tho I will admit that in maddening enemies usually have way to much avoid even factoring in hit+20 and support buffs to offset the shaky accuracy, but still, as I said, you don't really have competing combat arts for that slot so might aswell keep it on on Bernie you could make an argument about dropping deadeye for something else (encloser is really good, curved shot extra hit can always come handy so it has competition with vengeance which be really good too with the right setup and mayyybe a movement skill) in general, on maddening I don't think you should use more than 2 weapon types at the same time, you NEED prowess skills to have decent hit, and using 1-2 weapon types means you also don't have to choose between lots of different combat arts some characters also get brave-like combat arts that basically outperform every other effective-damage combat art at your disposal (only reason they are not TOTALLY outperformed is because hitting 1 attack at non 100% accuracy is more likely than hitting 2 attacks at the same hit% - also I forgot, to break monster barriers in one hit), which means more free combat art slots (tho this is not entirely related considering only Bernie and Ashe get deadeye afaik)