JesterInBlack

I tested it by removing my shield and battalion Prt, and it looks like Armored Blow is considered a defense buff. Armored Blow does not increase your defense above 99, does not increase your Prt, and does not impact Armored Strike's damage once you're at 99 Def, either.

I was doing a silly playthrough that involved stacking a lot of defense, and I ran into a hidden mechanic, so I thought I would share this fun factoid. There is a second stat cap. Even with bonuses, stats cannot go over 99 (except HP, which is not displayed under "stats" in the unit details window). The normal stat caps for units are low enough that it is quite difficult to hit this second stat cap. Here's how it works: Let's say you have a Balthus with 84 defense normally, and he has Defense +2, Defiant Defense (+8), Rally Defense (+4), King of Grappling (+6), and cooking bonuses (+3). Even though that should add up to 107 total defense, it displays as 99 defense and both combat calculations and the stats total counter treat it as if you only had 99 defense. Bonuses to stats from cooking and abilities (including rallies) are limited by this. Protection, Resilience, or Attack/Mt bonuses (usually from accessories, weapons, and battalions) still stack above this limit and allow you to reach 100 or more in these derived stats. Damage reducing or damage increasing abilities (such as Flayn's Lily's poise, or the Enlightened One class's Sacred Power) also appear to stack beyond this limit, though I have not tested all of these. At first, I thought this was a bug. I used rally defense to try to survive 10 elites buffed Nemesis' Heaven's Fall combat art (which has 142 attack), and it did not help at all. The attack still dealt the same damage. But when I looked into the cause, it seems like this is an intentional power limit. One that is unlikely to come up in normal play, but can limit certain builds, especially in regards to fully buffed Nemesis.

For me, Edelgard's death on SS / VW stands out for its brutality. She doesn't even get to finish her last words.

Silver Snow: The last chapter takes place in the monastery, so it would make sense for the Gatekeeper to join you for that. Unless ... he transformed?

The good: Maddening generally forces you to mind your positioning, and the enemy scaling puts up stiff resistance, so I think that in general terms, it works well. I do like the choice to give consistent bonus abilities to all enemies of a given class, it eliminates those situations where forgetting an enemy has a skill results in a lethal mistake, which caught me out a few times in Lunatic+ in Awakening. Making linked support bonuses and gambit boosts more relevant is a positive change that adds depth to the game. The adjutant guard feature gives you a mid-late game option (on NG) which is more relevant to mitigate the high enemy attack speeds, but can't be used on a flier, which makes that choice more interesting. Due to limits on the casts of magic, it is no longer quite so easy to exploit a healing class to overlevel and outscale / trivialize content on the hardest difficulty just by spamming heal, which is a welcome change from prior titles. The bad or indifferent: I'm not a fan of ambush spawns, but divine pulse takes the edge off of that, and I have to admit giving the player a turn to uncounterably kill them wouldn't be as challenging. I think BE Church chapter 18 handles this well by telling you a turn before they are coming. I wish the game did that more often. I kind of wish they gave every boss the counterattack at any range skill, or at least a 2 range option so that they weren't so trivial to kill by outranging. There are still numerous degenerately powerful tools (avoid stacking, encloser spam, impregnable wall, etc.) that can trivialize parts of the game, even in Maddening, so I wouldn't call that balanced, although it is tactical. I think some of those powerful tools were considered when scaling the enemies, which makes Maddening a departure from the balance of simple unit vs. unit combat (like FE 6, 7, 8 ), and since it is often hard to safely win in a straight fight, it turns into more of a game of uncounterable damage or something like a strategic exchange of tactical nukes. This is a bit playstyle dependent, but I don't like risk, so the Maddening enemy dex bonus giving quite a few enemies low percentage chances of critting my units is unwelcome. Blessing works as a bandaid for that, but also does a lot more than just protect against crits. The attack speed buffs also push enemy evasion up, so I frequently had to rely on linked support bonuses and breaker skills with accurate combat arts to avoid gambling, or failing that, to just reduce the risk, and I think the evasion is a bit too high for units that can't afford a dip into the archer class for hit +20 (especially vs. certain flying units). I was somewhat disappointed with how boss movement worked out. Bosses being able to move actually seems to make Maddening easier in some situations, since you can lure them off the advantageous terrain, and so many of them are passive until you enter their range. Paralogue bosses generally tend to still be rooted in place. Then again, a chapter 4 where the death knight actively chases you would be a bit much.

I just stumbled across something so unintuitive I cannot believe it is intended. Fistfaire's damage bonus applies to onager seige weapons.

It is possible for rescue to warp a unit to a space that is not adjacent to the caster. When this happens, it seems to put the rescued unit on the edge of the map. This seems to happen when the caster is surrounded by a certain combination of hazardous ground / blocking terrain / edges of the map / other units. I'll test this more and see if I can't get more specific reproduction instructions.

If you achieve a rank of S+ in a skill, you can still do faculty training or drills for that skill. You don't get anything for it, but you still lose the activity point.

Adjutant guard seems to always proc a miracle effect if a follow-up attack would kill a unit which has more than 1 HP before the attack lands, so that could be useful for keeping liabilities alive. I have not tested how that interacts with brave weapons.