ZanaLyrander

Shez is kinda a fascinating main character because as detailed here, Shez, while extremely powerful, still isn't the strongest unit in the game in terms of winning fights. Their personal skill is more geared towards mobility than winning fights with enemy commanders, not that they really need the extra help for winning fights with such powerful dark magic spells and a tremendously powerful unique class. But what Shez has over every other unit in my mind is the ability to win battles. The ability to just zip to trouble spots with their personal ability and Shadow Warp is so tremendously useful that they beat out basically any other character in terms of guaranteeing the overall success of the mission. There are certainly units I think are stronger in a 1 on 1 fight, but in terms of achieving victory in the larger context of the battle, Shez can't be beat.

I have no idea honestly. I've always considered Invert Physical/Magic to be a waste of a weapon attribute slot and never really experimented with it.

Okay, I just have to share this because it made me laugh. I just found a Scholar's Tome with Invert Physical/Magic and Invert Offense/Defense, which took me a few minutes to even wrap my head around. So it deals magic damage with your Defense stat, deals physical damage with your Resistance stat, resists physical damage with your Magic stat, and resists magic damage with your Strength stat. This is undoubtedly a terrible weapon, but the sheer absurdity of it is kinda hilarious.

The small combat arts can be effective, I'm especially fond of Blizzard for that quick, spammable damage and freeze. But generally, my strategy with spells is one spell that gathers enemies up and juggles them for a bit, like Luna, Excalibur, or Bolganonne, and one 'finisher' that does tons of damage like Hades or Agnea's Arrow. Used in conjunction, they basically clear an entire area, commanders and all.

Sadly no, not that I know of. This is something I complained about, you can't use the training instructor on characters in the 'Other' category, which unfortunately will always include the three renown bonus character.

I think someone did an estimate a while back and it's like a 10% increase or something? Not a huge difference, but enough to be noticeable if you're leveling up several times.

I don't think setting fire to a town full of civilians is really comparable to setting a fire in the middle of a battlefield, treating those as morally equivalent and equally bad seems a tad disingenuous.

While I agree with you on the rest, this part I do have to disagree with. Rhea has been preaching for a thousand years that those who have Crests are blessed by the Goddess, placing a ton of religious importance on Crests, which of course led to those with Crests being elevated, and an importance being placed on maintaining the bloodline of those with Crests. Like, you can make the argument that she's not deliberately responsible for creating the caste system of Fodlan (and even that is debatable at best), it is still a direct result of her actions.

I have wanted to test that as well. However, I can confirm that maxing out and getting 9999 gold on the secret mission with Despoil is similarly effortless. I've run that mission with each, but not both at once, they both hit the cap easily, so I can't really compare the rates.

Jeez, hadn't even considered that. Honestly, with how generous the game can be with stat boosting items, especially if you buy them with renown each playthrough, that feels like overkill to me. But the overall point still stands, you can never have too much money in this game.

Once you've maxed out all the facilities, all the resources used to upgrade said facilities become useless, so you can just trade them in at the supply master for Smithing Stones, which you can then trade in for whatever forging materials you want. Meanwhile, the more you upgrade a weapon, the more expensive each upgrade becomes, but they cost the same amount in materials forever. As a result, by that point, you're gonna run out of money way faster than materials. But yeah, prior to that, materials are more of the rate limiting resource.

Sounds like Appraisal is probably a pretty minor benefit. That said, I do still swear by Despoil, especially early on in the campaign. Early missions give barely any money, it was not uncommon for me to be making more money from Despoil than I made from the mission itself. And even with endgame missions, Despoil was giving me around 33-50% more money per mission, it makes a big difference.

Hmm... that sounds pretty similar to my experience with Appraisal equipped. Perhaps it's not having as big an impact as I thought. Regardless, Appraisal vs no Appraisal doesn't have even close to as big an impact as Hard vs. Maddening. Difficulty definitely plays a much larger role in drop quality.

On Maddening, with it equipped, it's rare to see even Brave stuff, it's mostly Zoltan stuff. As for higher level attributes, it's been almost exclusively lvl 3 stuff with rare exceptions, but I admit I don't know how much of that is Appraisal and how much of that is just higher tier weapons having higher level attributes. Also on Maddening with Appraisal equipped, getting A rank rusted weapons from killing monsters is pretty much the norm. Every now and then I'll get B rank stuff, but more often than not it's A rank, regalia weapons. It's led me to believe that Appraisal may actually be way more valuable on higher difficulties where you can get the really good stuff, it seems like it just makes the good drops more consistent, but again, this is purely anecdotal evidence and I don't have much to compare it to. But whenever I spend a mission as a character without it equipped, it does seem like drop quality takes a noticeable hit.

Adding onto my earlier comment about Despoil, I'm really unsure how to evaluate Appraisal. Like, I don't even know how one would go about testing something like that. Better drops certainly sounds useful, and I've been using it and Despoil on a number of characters because I'm not struggling and don't need the extra damage, but could always use more money and good weapons. Despoil is easy to evaluate: it caps out at 9999 gold per mission, which, while a shame, is still a very nice chunk of change, and adds up real quick. On shorter missions, I usually get around 5000 something instead, you just don't get enough kills. But on any mission where you get 1000+ kills, you're probably gonna hit the cap. Money is the rate limiting resource for most things in this game honestly, which is why people love Balthus' personal skill so much (which I'm pretty sure stacks with Despoil). But Appraisal... I can report I'm getting tons of great drops with Appraisal on Maddening, but getting a side by side comparison of with and without Appraisal is damn near impossible so I have no idea how much it's actually doing and how much is just me getting lucky.

Yeah, Quality Material is essentially just a waste of a weapon attribute slot, it just saves you a tiny bit of money and materials by saving you the cost of one, maybe two reforgings at most, and frankly you shouldn't be wasting money and materials on a weapon with Quality Material in the first place.

I will say, Despoil is really nice to have. I'll probably replace it eventually, but god, you can never have enough money in this game, you can splurge a million gold in no time at all, the training instructor and blacksmith are fucking expensive, and Despoil saves a ton of time.

Yeah, any abilities you've learned stay unlocked, even if the character can't use that class anymore. And yes, their gender immediately updates in the Other category.

I'm with Burklight on these two, if you're making use of the cooking (and if not, why aren't you?) these are both completely free, there's no reason not to equip them on Shez and Byleth.

The real problem with Rhea is that she is utterly convinced that she knows better than everyone else, yet goes out of her way to avoid sharing that knowledge, actively lying to the world about their history. It makes it all the more frustrating when she goes off about how even a thousand years later humans remain little more than fools, when she's been actively working to ensure that is the case.

Abilities certainly seem to play a large part of it, but I think gear may play an even larger role. I'm on my first Maddening run as well at the moment (SB), just finished chapter 10 and so far it's been far easier than I expected, despite the sizable level gap between my units and the enemy, and I largely attribute that to my equipment. This is like my seventh run, so at this point, most of my units are using high tier, fully upgraded weapons, and I've taught them spells via the adjutant system that make for really nasty combos when used in conjunction with each other. Having powerful weapons and good combat arts/spells seems to more than make up for the enemies higher levels.

Honestly, Seteth's relationship with Rhea has always frustrated me. He calls her out on some of her morally questionable actions, but she basically brushes him off and he just accepts it, continuing to support her regardless.

Yeah, in context I understand why this is the case, it's just frustrating that everyone has all these perfectly valid criticisms of Rhea and the Central Church, and she's never in a position where she has to justify her actions. She clearly believes what she's doing is right, she's not evil for the sake of evil. Many would argue she's not evil at all, though I would certainly disagree. It's frustrating that she seems to be allergic to explaining herself.

I don't want them to sit down and get along, I want them to yell at each other and call each other out for the shit they're doing. It can be during battle, from across the battlefield before the fighting starts, whatever. Just more complex arguments than 'you're evil, die' would be nice. The characters point out that Rhea is responsible for inequality, xenophobia, lack of social mobility, etc. But none of them ever say that to her face. We never hear Rhea try to justify any of it.

You know, we discussed earlier in this thread whether or not Edelgard is right to declare war on the Central Church, whether or not there was a better way to undo the cultural damage the Central Church has done with their caste system and religiously encouraged xenophobia. But looking back, what really frustrates me is that the conflict between Edelgard and Rhea, in both Three Houses and Three Hopes, is essentially entirely military. They never actually engage one another ideologically, both just kinda accepting that the other is evil and needs to die. I'm not asking them to sit down for an organized, proctored debate, but it's frustrating that they make no effort to really explain or justify their stance to one another. Rhea just treats Edelgard as a naive and wicked child who needs to be put down, and Edelgard treats Rhea as a corrupt force of stagnation that needs to be removed from power by any means necessary (though interestingly she doesn't actually want Rhea dead in Three Hopes). It just seems a shame that they don't really call one another out on the stuff that they do aside from broad platitudes.