ZanaLyrander

Barbarossa does take some getting used to, it's a weirdly aggressive bow moveset that moves towards your target while attacking a lot, which admittedly threw me for a loop initially. But it kinda works, he doesn't actually mind getting up close, and still has plenty of long range options. His class action is also really powerful. It leads to a really flexible moveset once you're used to it.

Oh boy, it's Claude time.

Oh, I'm sorry if I gave the impression I was starting at level 1. Most of my characters were in the 80s or 90s when I started doing these leveling runs. I'm just focusing on one character at a time and leveling them up to 120 by continuing to go through the main campaign. The record keeper is indeed better for farming exp, but as you say, the stat-booster items are tremendously valuable, and can only be acquired by progressing through the campaign, so I prefer to do that.

I think I've never really adjusted to the self damage abilities like Lifeforce, there's just something about them that goes against my gaming instincts. Even having said that, given that my strategy with Bernie is spamming Drill Arrow and Deadeye, Lifeforce is extremely costly. I'm sure swapping to smaller Might CAs would probably make it a bit more viable, but for my current strategy Bernadetta practically empties her hp bar in less than a minute, even with the healing from The Inexhaustible. Anyway, since he was already fairly close to 120 and I just finished leveling him up, here are my thoughts on the man, the myth, the legend, Ferdinand von Aegir. Ferdinand- I am speed. Ferdinand's personal action ability is second only to Sylvain's in my mind, he gains momentum throughout the fight, getting faster and faster until he's practically a blur. Having the Crest of Cichol makes Ferdinand ideal for using the Spear of Assal and Ochain Shield, making him tremendously durable and the worst nightmare of enemy cavalry units. This, combined with Rejuvenation, makes him one of the few units who can make use of Lifeforce without even really having to pay attention to your health, he heals so fast it doesn't matter. He's also well suited to using Járngreipr as a War Master, since it too is keyed to the Crest of Cichol. That said, given its effectiveness against cavalry, the Spear of Assal is pretty much objectively better, so unless you really hate using Caspar or Balthus for some reason, you're probably better off keeping Ferdinand as a lance user, and he's definitely one of the strongest lance users in the game. Really what I learned from Ferdinand's journey is to appreciate the value of effective weapons. Cavalry units are extremely common, and Ferdinand goes through them like a hot knife through butter. Even without any abilities equipped to make him better at dealing stun gauge damage, anyone with the Spear of Assal can pulverize the stun gauge of anyone on horseback, which is definitely a massive advantage, even if the damage increase isn't huge.

Alright, just finished leveling Bernadetta to level 120, so here's what I've learned. Bernadetta - Bernie is the queen of Combat Art spam. Spamming combat arts is par for the course in this game, especially for units with Armsthrift like Bernie. But Bernie's crest giving all her combat arts a 20% chance to just not have a cooldown puts her on top of the heap when it comes to abusing combat arts. Equip her with The Inexhaustible or (for added hilarity) Thunderbrand, you really do get a feeling of "what cooldowns?" I also think people really underestimate her personal skill. An area denial zone that enemies can't enter without getting frozen is tremendously powerful, even discounting the fact that Bernie gets boost to her crit chance while standing in it. The fact that she gets Forethought on top of all this, filling her Warrior and Awakening Gauges a bit every time she uses a combat are (which if you've been paying attention is all the time) is just plain silly. Honestly the only drawbacks she has are being slightly lacking in non self-damaging damage boost abilities. She has Lifeforce, but given the rate at which she spams combat arts, I wouldn't recommend it, you'll kill yourself real quick. She does get Luna, so if you swap over to Thunderbrand Bernie, she can make use of combat arts that hit resistance for some pretty serious damage, but still be warned that a lot of enemies are going to take a few CAs to take down, she's a machine gun, not a nuke.

Additional enemies and more attacks on your bases would be a definite plus, especially the latter one. There really aren't enough objectives that involve defense, you're almost always on the attack, and I personally have always enjoy hold the line scenarios. Plus, as you say, it'd be good to get some more use out of the defense unique tactical abilities. I'm a bit less certain about the other two suggestions though, especially nerfing CA/Spells. That sounds more like a rebalance of the game than something you'd tack on to a specific difficulty setting. Going through Easy, Normal, Hard, Maddening, and then having them suddenly change the rules for the last difficulty setting sounds unpleasant. Other than that... honestly, it's hard to think of things I'd like to see added that aren't just changes I'd like to see to the whole game rather than just one difficulty setting.

Huh, if that's true, someone should edit the wiki to reflect that.

Pretty much, as a Gremory, it's way more efficient to use your spells even on just crowds of mooks, your combos take too long for that. That said, there are plenty of spells that are excellent at wave clear, Luna springs instantly to mind, I'd argue one cast of Luna is more efficient at clearing waves than any moveset you care to name. But it's certainly not as exciting as doing so with combos on a hybrid class, and again, hybrid classes still have the option of dropping a spell to clear a wave if they can't be bothered to do it manually, whereas it's really your only option as a Gremory.

She's definitely still quite potent. Agnea's Arrow is one of the most powerful spells in the game, and Dorothea is one of the few characters that learns it, and the only non postgame character who can teach it. It really does come down to her spell list, she lacks a lot of advantages that other units have, yet her spell list is extremely powerful, and she forms high rank supports with characters who can teach her a fair number of other extremely powerful spells, and that's apparently all she needs to succeed, she doesn't even struggle on Maddening. We're all discussing how best to create optimized builds and Dorothea is just over here face-rolling through Maddening on her spells alone, and she's not even having a hard time, it makes me feel a little silly for putting so much thought into the builds of other characters.

Hybrid magic/physical classes are top tier in this game. In theory, they're supposed to sacrifice some raw power for additional flexibility, but in practice, they end up just being good at everything, able to handle enemies with high defense or high resistance without any difficulty. There's not much need for pure physical attackers or pure spellcasters, when a Trickster, Mortal Savant, or Dark Knight can be good enough at both to fill both roles at once. Still, Gremory's spamming spells can be very powerful, even if they lack the flexibility of hybrid classes.

I added my thoughts on Dorothea as well. Dorothea is a weird character. On a personal level, she's one of my favorite characters in the game, but from a mechanical standpoint, she really seems like she should be weak... and yet, she's not. Dorothea -Dorothea plays a lot like a magic focused version of Petra. Not many damage increasing abilities, but she has Death Blow, and a ton of abilities that increase her Awakening Gauge fill rate, allowing her to be fairly effective as a stun gauge build. Still, while she can use Awakening even more than Petra, and can utilize the same overpowered Excalibur + Agnea's Arrow combo as Petra (learning Excalibur from Lindhart is trivial since they can have A rank support), she's not quite as good at destroying stun gauges as Petra is, at least when not Awakened. On the other hand, her magic stat is better than Petra's so it's rare that she needs to break stun gauges, most enemies don't survive her spells. While Gremory is her preferred class, Dorothea is quite potent as a sword user as well, especially when equipped with a Witstrike weapon like Blutgang or Ridill. Her ability list is fairly disappointing, yet it doesn't seem to impair her much oddly enough. She also one of the only units who can teach Agnea's Arrow, so she's incredibly handy to have around. Really, Dorothea's journey to 120 has taught me just how overpowered magic is in this game. Her ability list is fairly lackluster, her stats aren't tremendously impressive, her personal skills aren't bad, but they're nothing tremendously exciting either... so why does playing as her on Maddening still feel so easy? And the answer is simply that magic is tremendously overpowered in Three Hopes, and as a magic user, Dorothea has very little difficulty dealing with even the hardest challenges the game has to offer.

A fair point, Cleobulus certainly seems quite comfortable in Cornelia's form (I would even go so far as to say a little too comfortable for someone borrowing the appearance of a literal saint and dressing it up like... that). I think another possibility might be that... well, ugly as this sounds, Thales is an asshole, and while we never see Thales and Cleobulus interact directly, the way they refer to one another when talking to others indicates to me that they don't get along very well, so it's also entirely possible he's deliberately misgendering Cleobulus. Still, with so little information to go on, speculation doesn't get us very far. Regardless, I really wish we got to learn more about the original Cornelia, she honestly sounds fascinating, and her friendship with Anaselma, Edelgard's mother/Dimitri's stepmother, is another thing I'd like to see explored. She saved the entire Kingdom from a plague, and all she asked in return is 'please save my friend from the Empire'. There's a hell of a story there we're not being told.

This. Your tome wielders should honestly never be fighting fair to begin with, you're too squishy and slow moving to be wading in and trading blows. Spells that juggle your opponents or trap them in multiple hit effects such as Excalibur, Luna, Bolganone, or Meteor are a must for any tome wielder, or ice spells that freeze your enemy in place. if you allow your enemies an opportunity to retaliate, you're doing it wrong. I find that one such setup spell, combined with a finisher spell like Agnea's Arrow, Dark Spikes, or Hades can wipe out almost anything if you combo them together. Your enemies shouldn't be able to hit you, because they should either be trapped in one of your spells, or dead.

Yeah, hybrid magic/physical characters really seem to be the ideal for this game. Characters that are entirely devoted to one or the other can occasionally be slow when they encounter enemies with high defense against their damage type. Though I admit, this seems to be more of a problem for purely physical attackers than purely magical attackers. Enemies with high resistance are rare, and their resistance doesn't seem to get as high as the defense of heavily armored enemies like Fortress/Great Knights, and their hp tends to be fairly low as well. It's why sword and lance classes are so powerful, having access to strong physical attacks with their combos as well as magic spells. Lysithea kinda gets around this problem by having easy access to Luna (the spell, not the ability, though she has that too; god it's confusing having both in the same game), and thus being able to simply ignore enemy resistance.

Yeah, Hubert is awesome. I think for some people he gets overshadowed by Shez because they're both dark magic users, but Hubert is honestly incredibly powerful. Plus he's one of the only character who can take full advantage of the Dark Bishop class, being one the only male units with dark magic. He also makes for a very effective Dark Knight. I admit, I use Hubert very similarly to how I use Shez, my opening move in most fights is Luna, followed by either Hades or Dark Spikes, it tends to work very well.

Man, I know she's almost certainly extremely dead at this point, but while I enjoyed getting to see the real Monica, the one I really wanna see is the real Cornelia. Woman who stopped a plague on her own and basically turned down any sort of reward other than asking the king to save her friend from the Empire. Like shit there's some interesting stuff going on there that we get almost no details about, and she sounds like a fascinating and wonderful person, and then the slithering assholes murdered her and replaced her with a massively sadistic asshole because Fodlan is not allowed to have nice things

The right person for the job does seem an odd way of putting it considering they assigned an unrepentant sadist to play the role of a literal saint, but I get what you mean all the same. I don't know whether to be impressed by Cleobulus' acting talent that he managed to keep the act up as long as he did, or really, really disappointed in everyone in the Kingdom for not noticing the difference.

Yeah, in some sense, that's kinda why he's lower on the list: I'm doing this partially to get everyone to 120, but also partially to learn more about each unit and what makes them strong if anything. And what makes Felix strong is... kinda obvious.

Haven't done one of these level to 120 runs with him yet, he's on my list. The Blue Lions are tough because of how many of them are route exclusive. But he's definitely one of the better sword units in the game.

I will say, I hope this is a NG+ tier list and not a completely new game tier list, because if it's the latter I'm not gonna have a lot to contribute, I'm in so deep that I already barely remember what starting fresh was like.

I've honestly lost count of how many runs of Three Hopes I've done at this point, and by now, most of the units belonging to the main three houses are in the 80s or 90s in terms of level. Shez, the house leaders, and Byleth meanwhile are all at max level. As a result, in my past couple of runs, I've barely been using Shez and the other characters I've already maxed out, because they have nothing to gain from more experience, I only use them during main story missions. What I do instead, is pick one character who is not yet 120, and play as them almost exclusively until they hit 120, then pick someone else. This gives me a pretty in depth understanding of these characters as I inevitably experiment and gravitate towards strategies and builds that work well. So I figured I'd share what I've learned about the units I've done this with so far, as well as what it's taught me about the game in general. I'll likely add more to this as I complete this journey with more characters. Sylvain - What I learned from leveling up Sylvain to 120 is that he's overpowered as hell. Seriously, Sylvain has, in my opinion, the single best personal skill in the game. It drastically increases his range, damage, and the AoE of his spell/combat arts as he builds up the hit counter. His skill is essentially the only one I think is good enough to make it worth replacing Shez's own personal skill with, mainly because Shez, as an Asura, can rack up hits so fast that they can actually make use of this ability even better than Sylvain himself can. Sylvain's journey to level 120 also really drove home something I already knew: hybrid attackers are insanely strong in Three Hopes. A unit that can target either defense or resistance with their combos and spells/combat arts has a much, much easier time than a unit that can only target one or the other. Magical attackers suffer from this less than physical attackers, as enemies with very high resistance are rare, and often don't have much hp compared to more physically sturdy enemies like Fortress/Great Knights. Dark Knight Sylvain is frankly one of the strongest units in the game, and I don't say that lightly. Petra - Most players I've talked to here seem to really underestimate Petra. It's probably because Petra has almost no abilities that boost her damage, and her personal ability is fairly defensive in nature, so everyone mistakenly assumes she's weak. But Petra's journey to level 120 taught me another valuable lesson: do not underestimate stun gauge builds. While Petra has very few abilities that boost her damage, she has access to Death Blow, Heavy Hitter, Patience, and a number of abilities that increase her Awakening Gauge fill rate, including her own personal support ability, which is basically just a stronger version of Burst of Resolve. Combined with Essence of Wind boosted Excalibur (learned from Lindhardt) and Agnea's Arrow (learned from Dorothea), Petra has all the tools she needs to absolutely devour enemy stun gauges and slaughter her foes with critical rushes. Though to be honest, the Excalibur + Agnea's Arrow combo is so strong that even with Petra's mediocre magic stat, few things survive it, and given that she can reach A rank support with both Lindhardt and Dorothea, learning the spells needed for this combo was trivial. Stun gauge builds are criminally underrated, and Petra might just be one of the most powerful exemplars of such a build. Combined with her incredible defensive mobility from her personal ability and the excellent combos and class action of the Trickster, I'm honestly prepared to declare Petra to be high tier, if not top tier material. Flame spirit, protect everyone else. Hilda - Hilda is definitely closer to a more traditional damage build, and watching her absolutely delete enemies with War Strike certainly leaves little question as to why damage boost abilities are so highly valued. Offensive Tactics, Big Game Hunter, Luna, Undaunted... make no mistake, you get hit by Hilda, you're probably not getting back up. Honestly, Hilda's journey to 120 didn't teach me quite as much as Sylvain or Petra's, mostly because what makes Hilda good is fairly obvious. But to be honest, that taught me a good lesson by itself: interesting, creative builds are all well and good, but sometimes it's good to remind yourself a straightforward approach can be very effective. Hilda is a blunt instrument, and a very, very effective one at that. Hilda's playstyle is obvious and simple, and it works. And you know what? That's good enough for me. Dorothea - Dorothea plays a lot like a magic focused version of Petra. Not many damage increasing abilities, but she has Death Blow, and a ton of abilities that increase her Awakening Gauge fill rate, allowing her to be fairly effective as a stun gauge build. Still, while she can use Awakening even more than Petra, and can utilize the same overpowered Excalibur + Agnea's Arrow combo as Petra (learning Excalibur from Lindhart is trivial since they can have A rank support), she's not quite as good at destroying stun gauges as Petra is, at least when not Awakened. On the other hand, her magic stat is better than Petra's so it's rare that she needs to break stun gauges, most enemies don't survive her spells. While Gremory is her preferred class, Dorothea is quite potent as a sword user as well, especially when equipped with a Witstrike weapon like Blutgang or Ridill. Her ability list is fairly disappointing, yet it doesn't seem to impair her much oddly enough. She also one of the only units who can teach Agnea's Arrow, so she's incredibly handy to have around. Really, Dorothea's journey to 120 has taught me just how overpowered magic is in this game. Her ability list is fairly lackluster, her stats aren't tremendously impressive, her personal skills aren't bad, but they're nothing tremendously exciting either... so why does playing as her on Maddening still feel so easy? And the answer is simply that magic is tremendously overpowered in Three Hopes, and as a magic user, Dorothea has very little difficulty dealing with even the hardest challenges the game has to offer. Bernadetta - Bernie is the queen of Combat Art spam. Spamming combat arts is par for the course in this game, especially for units with Armsthrift like Bernie. But Bernie's crest giving all her combat arts a 20% chance to just not have a cooldown puts her on top of the heap when it comes to abusing combat arts. Equip her with The Inexhaustible or (for added hilarity) Thunderbrand, you really do get a feeling of "what cooldowns?" I also think people really underestimate her personal skill. An area denial zone that enemies can't enter without getting frozen is tremendously powerful, even discounting the fact that Bernie gets boost to her crit chance while standing in it. The fact that she gets Forethought on top of all this, filling her Warrior and Awakening Gauges a bit every time she uses a combat are (which if you've been paying attention is all the time) is just plain silly. Honestly the only drawbacks she has are being slightly lacking in non self-damaging damage boost abilities. She has Lifeforce, but given the rate at which she spams combat arts, I wouldn't recommend it, you'll kill yourself real quick. She does get Luna, so if you swap over to Thunderbrand Bernie, she can make use of combat arts that hit resistance for some pretty serious damage, but still be warned that a lot of enemies are going to take a few CAs to take down, she's a machine gun, not a nuke. Ferdinand- I am speed. Ferdinand's personal action ability is second only to Sylvain's in my mind, he gains momentum throughout the fight, getting faster and faster until he's practically a blur. Having the Crest of Cichol makes Ferdinand ideal for using the Spear of Assal and Ochain Shield, making him tremendously durable and the worst nightmare of enemy cavalry units. This, combined with Rejuvenation, makes him one of the few units who can make use of Lifeforce without even really having to pay attention to your health, he heals so fast it doesn't matter. He's also well suited to using Járngreipr as a War Master, since it too is keyed to the Crest of Cichol. That said, given its effectiveness against cavalry, the Spear of Assal is pretty much objectively better, so unless you really hate using Caspar or Balthus for some reason, you're probably better off keeping Ferdinand as a lance user, and he's definitely one of the strongest lance users in the game. Really what I learned from Ferdinand's journey is to appreciate the value of effective weapons. Cavalry units are extremely common, and Ferdinand goes through them like a hot knife through butter. Even without any abilities equipped to make him better at dealing stun gauge damage, anyone with the Spear of Assal can pulverize the stun gauge of anyone on horseback, which is definitely a massive advantage, even if the damage increase isn't huge.

Resetting levels allows you to level up again in another class, and hopefully get better stat increases from that class. Your character stat growths will be the same, but you still might end up with fairly different stats. Honestly, I don't use the resetting levels feature, it's easier to just farm stat growth items through repeated NG+ runs.

You know, in some sense, I'm a tiny bit disappointed that they brought back the weapon triangles in Three Hopes, whereas in Three Houses, it was pretty much restricted to the breaker abilities. I've seen plenty of justifiable complaints about, for example, how certain units who are otherwise really good don't get as much chance to shine because you want to have a variety of different weapons so as to better take on different enemies, and you already have a stronger and/or mandated unit of that weapon type. Personally I think people put a bit too much emphasis on the weapon triangle, it doesn't really make as big a difference as you might think in this game, but still, deploying three or four characters with the same weapon type is still usually a bad choice, which limits the usefulness of some units/classes. Though I do enjoy the breaker abilities and battalions for allowing you to combat that a bit and minimize the downsides of deploying multiple units with the same weapon type.

I don't think there's enough information to go on to determine if Cleobulus is transgender honestly (though I kinda hope he's not, given that yeah, having the one and only transgender character in the game be a remorseless, sadistic monster would be unfortunate). All we really know is that Cleobulus is in disguise as a female individual, and that Thales refers to him by male pronouns. But Thales being who he is, we have no real way of knowing whether or not Cleobulus would take offense to being referred to as such, since Thales and Cleobulus never interact directly. So it's anyone's guess really.

I think there is an excellent point here about the fact that there exists a point of diminishing returns regarding the strength of a unit. Like, there are certainly ways I think Shez could be improved. I'd love to have more damage skills like Dual Onslaught on Shez, and I'd love if Shez had a crest. But at the same time... Shez is already annihilating some of the strongest commanders on Maddening in a single spell. I don't know if I'd even notice the difference if Shez had any of these improvements. Once a character is strong enough that the hardest challenges in the game are easy for them, additional strength doesn't change anything. It's why I consider Shez to be high S tier despite lacking the raw power of some of the other characters I consider S tier, because they've reached that level of diminishing returns, additional strength would be wasted. This leaves Shez as strong enough to be considered S tier, with the added benefit of insane map presence. That is why I consider them high S tier.