Boomhauer007

Anybody that tells you need to reset because of level ups is wrong. As for actual tips, without knowing what route... - The faculty are great RNG fail safe fall backs, Catherine in particular has ridiculous stats if recruited early. Don't be afraid to switch out units with bad levels. - There are very few maps that penalize you for playing slowly. Don't be afraid to take a bunch of turns early game if you think you need to because unless you have Dedue there are very few characters that can take multiple hits on enemy phase. - Go west in the mock battle. Your divine pulse recharges between part 1 and 2 of chapter 5 so go nuts using it on those pass reinforcements. Also, if you aggro the archers of the top of that map the entire map will rush you down. - Gambits are your friend, use them a bunch. Enemies have sky-high charm, not everybody will be able to land attack gambits all the time. Support gambits are as busted as they've always been. I can come up with more but I can come up with more but that's a basic start.

Lots of them really. Felix and Caspar are usually in the training ground. Ashe and Mercedes are usually in the chapel. Hubert is wherever Edelgard is a lot, same with Dedue and Dimitri. Linhardt and Lysithea are in the library more often than anyone else. I'm sure I'm missing plenty but it was pretty clear they thought about placement with everybody.

Bro gambits are absurd on your side, the damage is the least important part of them. The wide range attack ones like blaze can halt entire enemy formations in their tracks. Stride lets you ignore any range issues. Impregnable wall gives you lol 5 uses to aggro anything for free; enemies could have literally infinite attack and it wouldn't matter. The high ranks get even crazier, retribution lets you wipe the map of siege users for free. Dance of the goddess makes one turning maps a cake walk. You get an AoE miracle that activates at 100% and lasts until it's used.

Couldn't make sense of the poll option. Anyway, just beat GD NG Maddening and was wondering what some impressions people had were. I liked it better than hard being too easy, but I would very much agree with people calling it lazy difficulty. Pump stats, add enemies, give certain classes certain skills, same turn reinforcements, and basically call it a day. The bad: Some of the paralogues don't feel like they were play tested at all. Catherine / Ashe comes down to memorizing Pegasus spawns. Alois / Shamir spawns a million STRs that are pass units and wyverns, making forward progress without warp a nightmare. I could name some more (Hilda ugh) but you get the point. There's an over reliance on avoid tanking late game. With attack numbers into the 60s and AS into the 50s it's pointless trying to take any hits, and much easier to just alert stance + (or impregnable wall + seal defense) all your problems away. The good: The enemies absolutely needed the stat buff. Even paladins could double most things on hard, and early game was your entire team one shoting everything it came across. They finally made the church units not pointless. Catherine / Shamir / Alois / Seteth are fantastic replacements for RNG screwed people, Catherine in particular is a monster if you recruit her quickly. I thought most (ugh ch 13) of the main line missions were pretty well done. Challenging but fair. Stray thoughts I didn't want this to be a bash rant so I intentionally put more positives than negatives. Most maddening missions can still be cheesed with stride / goddess dance / warp / retribution etc and are a reminder that there is no way to balance OP gambits workout fundamentally changing the game. Swords suck even more, bows still insane. Fliers are even better, but high difficulty fire emblem always widens the class gap so that's not new. That was all over the place, more importantly what do you think?

Is this in NG or NG+? Because that makes a massive difference. Quick riposte and magic range +1 are probably Uber tier skills but take eternity to get on NG, same with alert stance+. Or what difficulty are we rating? HP+5 is great for maddening early game but unnecessary on hard.

This may sound stupid but I really hope Jeritza has a normal voice with his increased role because he sounds absolutely ridiculous to me in his few in game lines. This guy is supposed to be a death knight but every time he talks (non Darth Vader mask voice) I'm thinking of Eeyore.

Gonna quote myself from an old post "I just finished a mostly backwards / meme / no mounts run on church, not too bad but a noticeable tick above hard. Also banned all non attacking gambits and lord battalions. Lack of movement was by far the most noticeable thing, forces you to deal with a lot more. My team was: Byleth (Bishop), Seteth (Hero/Boomer), Flayn (Fortress Knight), Raphael (Assassin), Caspar (Warlock), Bernadetta (Dancer), Leonie (Gremory), Marianne (Warrior), Lorenz (Noble), Felix (Sniper) Even with that lineup I never really struggled on any map, it wasn't even hard brute forcing the final map (kill all the beasts they said, lol them). Felix was my safety unit but Marianne ended up pretty good, Seteth was ridiculous, and Flayn with a bolt axe+ was unstoppable with her like 35/30 defenses. Even Lorenz was useful through the end. The the funniest part was losing Lorenz after the time skip, having him as an enemy paladin, recruiting him back to my team and seeing him back as Noble with all his enemy stats poofed away."

Crimson Flower was first for me. Didn't know you could spare them at that point, but wouldn't have anyway for the same reason I didn't spare the other major choice in that game. If I'm gonna be the Empire and conquer the world, you best believe we were killing every last one of them.

It's not a fire emblem game until one or both of your parents die.

To answer the actual question, your friend is about as close as any of us are going to get. Very little of what you brought up is explicitly discussed in game, educated guesses on inference is pretty much all we have to go on for this topic.

GD > BE!E > BL >>>>>>Church GD: Pretty good maps, best final map concept (even if the actual boss is a bit random). I cannot overstate how nice it is to have a Lord that isn't an idiot. Gets cheesy at the end (guys we defeated racism) but man was it nice to have a guy who made good decisions. BE!E was the neatest concept they've had, the actual execution holds it back a bit. Why have it shorter? Why are we some dumb strike force instead of just the imperial army? I don't really care about those two random generals, why do you think I do, game? But it was cool to play with conquest was supposed to be and unapologetically conquer everything. I've never figured out the BL story love. We spend half the game following a heinously mentally unstable guy because "thems the rules and he's the king". Imagine telling an actual army that they're going to march back and forth across a continent multiple times because that guy said so. Only Felix calls him out the entire time, and largely in a way that doesn't accomplish anything. Edelgard going hegemon felt extremely out of character. I will say their part 1 is a lot more meaningful. I have like a 100 post topic here somewhere about my feelings on the church route, and it isn't good.

I really like fliers having canto traded for pass, that's a good one. Have seminars give a proportional amount of rank instead of the set number. They give way, way too little rank after like month 2. No one has said dismounting costs a turn yet? Feels like an obvious one

1. I like it, change is good. The battle themes are all solid, the out of battle themes not so much. Glad they made rain much more pronounced, the fire tracks in Fates were generally much better but you never heard them. 2. All of the battle themes are pretty good, hard to pick one. Maybe Fodlan Winds even if it plays a lot. 3. God Shattering Star, too easy. 4. The "dungeon" style battle themes, like most of the middle of white clouds. Just felt weak. 5. I think FE7 is still the top for me. 3H is solid but really held back by weak out of battle songs. Side note: The thing they did with blue skies and a battle and between heaven and earth is my favorite musical thing in the series. The shift from cheerier and happy to serious in the music was really cool. If only the map wasn't so bad...

It feels pretty obvious that it'll be DLC similar to what they did in Echoes, which is all the game really needs. Duscur incident seems like an easy place to go, or the war from beginning of the game. They can even reuse nemesis, we know how much they like reusing things in this game. Definitely doesn't need any sequel style / after the game story.

Hilda with 19 str at level 33 is something I would have thought was impossible wtf.

Bro I hate to burst your bubble but

I just recently finished all four routes in this game, and I have to say finishing the church route last really left a bad taste in my mouth. First off, I understand that every route has some same maps and that was a price to pay for having multiple routes and not having to pay for them separately, but copy-pasting an entire route of maps from Golden Deer and calling it different is something else. Now this might be acceptable if the story was significantly different, but then they also decided to copy / paste the story from Golden Deer, with basically only the final chapter being any different. And that final chapter just drops a bunch of info on you that you have already figured out if you've played the other routes, and then Rhea randomly goes crazy because apparently they drew the line at copying the final boss from GD. And I'm not particularly sure why it's an offshoot of black Eagles, because all the black Eagles characters basically disappear from the narrative post timeskip. This of course is double noticeable as you go through the maps since you're fighting against the Empire, as you fight a grand total of 2 students (Ashe and Lorenz) post timeskip, removing any sense of conflict with the enemy. Speaking of which, two of the lords are simultaneously resolved offscreen, and then when you finally think this route is going to do something different it turns out Dimitri was just a force ghost. Removing this route would have given time to work on literally anything else, like making crimson flower not 18 chapters. They could have easily just made Rhea's exposition take place in GD instead reusing "I'll totally tell you after this battle where I totally won't die". I'm not sure how quality this post is but I needed to rant and this is the only Message Board where people read things over three sentences.

This analysis kind of proved what I was saying, even with all of those weight drops the great knight is still getting doubled by both the warmaster and the wyvern lord, and using a skill slot to do it. Sure it helps a paladin, but why is a character ending in paladin investing in heavy armor? And I know not everybody likes to debate opportunity cost, but i see much more value in A+ riding for a great knight (or anything) for move +1 than A armor. Maybe I'm wrong here, but I don't think A+ axe / A armor / A+ riding is possible in a fresh run until it's too late to be of any practical use. That being said having thought about it I agree with previous posts that speed is less important in this game simply because any physical class can deal comical amounts of burst damage through skills, and enemy phase isn't terribly important in 3H.

Having played 4 all routes, my best summary of balance was they tried stuff that sounded good and then put it in without testing it. Weight -3 in armor is actually a great example of that to me, a good skill but useless on the classes that get it since fort knights are lucky to hit 10 speed. But yeah I don't think there's any way to balance the ridiculous move options in this game. You would have to do something ridiculous like just take out hyper canto or allow siege weapons to work on player phase, nothing exists in the game in it's current state to address it. Stride not being lol D rank would help but that's more of a bandaid than a fix.

To answer in terms of addressing the 3 points: 1. Stride still doesn't matter a ton for low move units because using it on high move units makes them even better. Why have 9 move when you can have 13 move? Especially when all those 8 move classes have hyper canto. 2. The speed penalties to armor classes are so ridiculous that you can have 0 weapon weight and it doesn't matter. And silver weapons are still pretty light for how strong they are. But I would speed is equally as important as it's always been, not any more or less than before. 3. You'd have to really seriously gimp the combat capabilities of fliers to make them not dominate. Or gimp their move. Or be 3H and give wyvern Lord 8b move and some of the best stats lol.

I just finished a mostly backwards / meme / no mounts run on church, not too bad but a noticeable tick above hard. Also banned all non attacking gambits and lord battalions. Lack of movement was by far the most noticeable thing, forces you to deal with a lot more. My team was: Byleth (Bishop), Seteth (Hero/Boomer), Flayn (Fortress Knight), Raphael (Assassin), Caspar (Warlock), Bernadetta (Dancer), Leonie (Gremory), Marianne (Warrior), Lorenz (Noble), Felix (Sniper) Even with that lineup I never really struggled on any map, it wasn't even hard brute forcing the final map (kill all the beasts they said, lol them). Felix was my safety unit but Marianne ended up pretty good, Seteth was ridiculous, and Flayn with a bolt axe+ was unstoppable with her like 35/30 defenses. Even Lorenz was useful through the end. The the funniest part was losing Lorenz after the time skip, having him as an enemy paladin, recruiting him back to my team and seeing him back as Noble with all his enemy stats poofed away.

They just went with standard anime climate rules; North is always cold, south is normal, and east or west has the desert.

So it turns out fortress knight Flayn is unironically kind of good Not pictured: Bolt Axe+ She has enough strength to she has enough strength to annihilate Mages with normal axes, enough magic to decimate tanks with the bolt axe, and enough split defenses to tank both. Also bolt axe+ has range 3 so she even counters snipers. If I had put her through Mage or brigand instead of Pegasus Knight she would have been Unstoppable.

I actually think Cyril is an interesting representation of what essentially amounts to brainwashing of children in a war setting. They don't address it in game, but the tactics are spot on: take kid from other country, steal them from shit situation, make things better while still not actually giving them much freedom, convince them you're the messiah, and they will do literally anything for you. As annoying as it is to hear "Lady Rhea" every single sentence out of his mouth, that's what would actually happen in that situation. Ironically it doesn't make me dislike his character any less (him and Catherine share that bottom spot pretty hard), but it had the potential to address something really intriguing.

I imagine most people's difficult route is the one they did first since the game becomes much easier once you know how it works. BE-E was my first route and I had exactly one flier and one mount, which made it much harder than it needed to be. Doesn't help that you have 4 less chapters to build skill ranks. BL final map and GD final map were both not too bad, but may have felt much harder had I gone like the first route. Not even to say I planned units out or anything, but had a much more purposeful path through classes; knowing to avoid useless classes like priest, stuff like that.