lenticular

I tend to see bexp more as generally a point in Titania's favour, and why I would probably rank her marginally higher than Seth overall. The two main arguments against using early-game prepromotes is that they level up too slowly and they take needed xp away from other units, leaving them under-leveled. Neither of these problems really apply when you throw bonus experience into the mix. It's trivially easy to level up Titania by throwing bexp at her. This is PoR bexp scaling that we're talking about, where going from --/19 to --/20 only costs about 5 times as much bexp as going from unpromoted 1 to 2, as opposed to RD bexp scaling where it costs 20 times as much. If you do level her up as you go along then she'll keep her status as unstoppable battle goddess pretty much indefinitely. Alternatively, if you just want to use her to trivialise the early game, then you can do so without having to worry that your other units are lagging behind where they're meant to be. You can just save up your bexp and then throw it all on Ike as and when you need it. Or on Oscar, Marcia, Jill, or whoever else you want to use.

I did think about doing that, but in the end I decided it would be much more fun to talk about the two games that I really did like a lot rather than grumbling and being negative about stuff that I didn't enjoy. After all, nobody really needs to see "Hot take! Random person on the Internet thinks that Metroid Dread was actually crap!" (Though, honestly, I don't think it was objectively crap, I just think that it was very much not for me.) I agree with most of this (though Monster Train isn't on my list since I played it last year). I don't think I ever got to Covenant 25 though, since I lost interest before I reached that point. It definitely doesn't have the replayability that Slay the Spire does, but being worse than StS is no crime at all, and it was still a whole lot of fun while it lasted.

You'll typically have more paralogues in Part 1 than Part 2, yes, but in order to unfavourably skew the ratio, you'd have to be doing more than twice as many in Part 1 than Part 2. For Part 1 paralogues, there are three that you're guaranteed to have access to (Sothis's, Flayn's and Dorothea & Ingrid's), an additional seven that are contingent on who you recruit (Alois & Shamir's, Raphael & Ignatz's, Hanneman & Manuela's, Ashe & Catherine's, Sylvain's, Felix's, Lorenz's) and then another two if you have the DLC. For Part 2, there are three guaranteed (Hubert's, Edelgard's, Bernadetta & Petra's), two contingent on recruiting (Leonie & Linhardt's (though, as you say...), Marianne's) and one more if you have the DLC (Anna and Jeritza's). It's certainly possible to do more than twice as many in Part 1, but it's also easily possible to do less than twice as many, which would then mean you'd have Raging Storm for over a third of chapters. As an example, imagine that you have the DLC and you only take all the free recruits. We'll say that you're playing as female Byleth, so let's include Sylvain in the free recruits. That would give you eight paralogues in Part 1 and four in Part 2, still keeping the ratio of 2:1. Or let's assume that you want to recruit literally everyone. That's twelve in Part 1 and five in Part 2 (not including the Linhardt and Leonie paralogue, since there's no Edelgard there either way). That does slightly tip the ratio in favour of Part 1, but not by very much.

I'm honestly having difficulty coming up with a full three. Most of the new games that I've played this year just haven't done it for me. Either I've bounced off them super quickly without really giving them a fair chance, or I've wound up actively disliking them. I don't know whether that's because they've all been bad and/or not for me, or just because the year has left me craving the comfort oif familiarity more than the excitement of novelty. My top two are easy though: 1. Life Is Strange: True Colors. I played and liked the original Life Is Strange, but haven't played any of the rest of the series until now. So it was on something of a whim that I picked up True Colors, but I'm really glad that I did. There's not much to the gameplay, but I play walking simulators so I don't really care about that. The characters, setting, writing and music are all absolutely top notch and I was thoroughly absorbed for my whole time playing it. 2. Wildermyth. This is a cute little indie TRPG with more depth to its combat than I originally credited it for. I don't think that its procedurally generated storytelling really stands up to the scrutiny of multiple replays, but I had a ton of fun with it. And for my third one... let's say New Pokémon Snap? That was OK, I guess.

I used to be of broadly this opinion as well, but have generally come to appreciate Edelgard as a unit more and more over time. Saying that Raging Storm is only available in 6 chapters sounds pretty damning, but Crimson Flower only has 18 chapters total, so those 6 chapters make up a third of the game. They're also some of the hardest chapters in the game, definitely some of the hardest chapters on Edelgard's route, so the impact is even more than what you'd expect for being available in a third of all chapters. I also don't think it matters all that much that you can't just spam Raging Storm with impunity. Obviously, she'd be better if she could spam it, but that doesn't stop her being absurdly powerful as is. The big benefit is that you use it when you need it. Edelgard is the best unit by a long way at the times where you absolutely need a broken overpowered unit; at other times she's merely very good. This concentration of force to the exact point that it's needed is incredibly strong. I think you're underselling Edelgard's early game a little bit here. She isn't completely dominant in the same way that Seth or Titania are, but she still has a big early game advantage. Some numbers: I'd also say that starting at level 1 is an advantage rather than a disadvantage. Right from the start of their games, Seth and Titania start losing the advantage that they have over everyone else, since they're leveling up much more slowly. By contrast, Edelgard is actually leveling up faster than anyone else due to her personal ability. In short, I'd say that while Seth and Titania are outstanding early game units who are merely very good in the late game, Edelgard is an outstanding late game unit who is merely very good in the early game. That said, I do agree with you about Three Houses having a narrower range of unit strengths than most other games in the series, which is a big part of the reason why I only had Edelgard as an honourable mention and not my overall top choice. (The other big reason is that I think that her personal class is a big newbie trap, which makes her considerably worse for inexperienced players, which was one of my criteria.) That was why I picked Robin as my overall top choice. However... ...even though I haven't ever played Thracia and have no idea who Safy is, I am tempted to change my pick now just because I am feeling contrary today.

My criteria would be: Fantastic availability Very strong throughout the whole game, from the start to the end Equally as good for a new player on the easiest difficulty setting as for a veteran player on the hardest difficulty setting Offers something that can't be replicated or replaced by any other unit The game is notably harder if you decide not to use them. And while I haven't played the entire series... yeah, that sounds like Robin to me. Honourable mention to Edelgard who starts out being probably the best unit in the game due to her great base stats and finishes off being probably the best unit in the game due to how ridiculous Raging Storm is.

After the casting announcement for the upcoming Mario movie that has one female main character amongst a ton of male characters, my answer to this question is "literally any female character". Some personal favourites, though: Pauline. Taking one of gaming's original damsels in distress and turning her into an actual character with agency and competence in Odyssey legitimately made me tear up, and I really hope Nintendo build on that. Birdo. She shows up a decent amount, but she's one of my favourites, so I still want more. And I want proper trans Birdo and not "let's retcon that and pretend it never happened" Birdo, thank you very much. Hariet. I just really love her character design with the bombs and the hair and would love to see her get some extra time in the sun. Various Wario characters. I have never played a single Wario game, but I still know some of the characters like Ashley and Penny. If someone like me who doesn't care at all about Warioware thinks they'd be good additions to Mario spinoffs, then that can only speak well of them. Queen Bee. I think she was in one Mario Kart game at some point? I think she could be cool in Mario sports games, though, where the combination of her size and flight could make her really interesting. The Penguins from Cool Cool Mountain in Mario 64. Who doesn't love penguins?

Honestly, my advice would be to drop down a difficulty notch. There's a lot of daft posturing within fandom along the lines of how everyone should play on Maddening/Classic and that anything below that is a failure and not a True Fan™ and it's all nonsense. Play on whatever difficulty is most fun for you. I'll particularly point out that several of the later chapters in Crimson Flower are comparable in difficulty to chapter 12, so if you're having trouble there then you're likely to continue having trouble later on. Also, if you're used to FE games with infinite grinding (eg Sacred Stones, Awakening, Birthright, Shadows of Valentia) then you can get that from Three Houses on Normal difficulty. Normal difficulty gives you the option of auxiliary battles that don't cost any battle points, letting you do as many as you want. As @SnowFire points out, this will only take you so far because of the way that xp scaling works in Three Houses, but it's an option if you want it. Normal difficulty also gives the option to retreat from battle at any point while retaining any xp you've earned in that battle. It's not exactly fun to use this over and over, but it's an option to pick any potential softlock and might be preferable to reverting to an old save and replaying a bunch.

Anything except for Tibarn vs Claude. Bow versus flier will be boring and feels like it would pretty much guarantee an all Three Houses final.

Welp, I've been doing my utmost to keep far, far away from this cursed trainwreck of a thread, but I guess I've failed my wisdom save versus leaving well the fuck alone on this one. So, hi. Queer woman here. Speaking only for myself, of course, because queer women are not a monolithic group and we have many varying and different opinions. For myself, though, when I see female characters -- be they in video games or other media -- I typically relate to them in two different ways.The first is external: is she an interesting character who drives the narative? Is she someone I would get along with if I met in real life? Do I find her physically attractive and enjoy looking at her? The second way is empathetic: can I imagine myself in her shoes? Is she having experiences similar to what I have had? Do I want to be her? In cases of blatantly sexual objectification, the latter almost invariably wins out. I don't feel horny because, hey, hot woman, I feel creeped out because I see objectification and find it gross and creepy. And then I feel even further creeped out when I realise that it is something that is ostensibly being done for my benefit, as the player/viewer. The game (or whatever) is making me complicit in the objectification, and I am not OK with that. This is especially the case when it comes to skeevy camera direction that unduly focuses on butt and boobs. If a woman is being presented as being comfortable with her sexuality then I can get behind that. At least in theory. Sometimes not, because it's handled attrociously, but if it's done well then I'm all for it. But when it's all about the camera lingering on boobs and butt, then that isn't something that the character is doing; that's something that is being done to the character. The focus is not on the character but on the person watching. Even for characters I otherwise like (eg, Manuela from Three Houses or Miranda Lawson from Mass Effect 2) that sort of treatment will sour me on the character. I can't think about either of those two characters without feeling just a little bit skeevy and gross. For characters that I am otherwise indifferent to (eg, Camilla from Fates), it means that the creepy objectification is the dominant memory and emtion I have when I think of them.

Yeah, avoiding overthinking is probably for the best. If you think it's kinda cool and I think it's kinda silly then we can probably just safely file it away under "works for some people but not others" and be done with it. I think the bigger issue would be if we were hypothetically allowing for some class masteries to grant permanent access to spells. If someone had mastered Priest, Mage and Dark Mage, then gone into Warlock and mastered that too, then that would potentially mean four extra spells to fit in somewhere, which would be more of a pain than just one.

It still seems out of place to me. Like, why do the individual spells carry the letters that they do? Is Death Γ the third iteration of the Death spell? Or is the spell normally just called Γ by the Agarthans and the Death part is just the Fódlan name? Neither one of them really feels believable to me, but I can't think of any other way they'd end up with that naming scheme. There is normally a difference in representation in any given font (or any individual person's handwriting), but the variance within each letter is greater than the variance between the letters. If I see a single glyph and am told that it's either a T or a Τ but am not told what the font is or given other reference text to check it against, I really have no way of knowing which is which. Stealing it can be tricky to make work because of the requirement to be faster than the target you're stealing from. The Death Knight has speed of 19 (Maddening) or 17 (Normal and Hard) when you fight him in Chapter 4. It's certainly possible to make work (and I have done so), but it's not trivial. I generally think it's easier just to kill him, honestly.

I'd had that thought as well. I think that just following the leads of mastery combat arts would make the sense. With those, the arts from beginner and intermediate classes are learned permanently (all the repositional arts, Triangle Attack and I'm pretty sure Subdue works that way too though I'd be lying if I said I'd ever used it) whereas the arts from mastering advanced, special and master classes are all tied to their class. UI might be an issue, since I'm not sure where all these extra known spells would fit, but this is fantasy game design so we can handwave it away and say that it's the fantasy UI designer's problem now. Another advantage of using unique spells for masteries would be that it wouldn't step on the toes of existing spell lists. For instance, if everyone could pick up Physic and Fortify from mastering Priest and Bishop respectively, then that would make Mercedes a terrible choice for a Bishop and Manuela a great one. Mercedes would still have a niche as "the character who can learn Physic and Fortify even if you put her in an offensive class", but that doesn't really fit the story and character. Agreed. I can understand that they would want a name for the combination of what used to be light tomes and what used to be staves, and calling that white magic is reasonable. And, in fact, they are properly unified, with White Magic Avoid working just as well with Heal as with Nosferatu. But then Black and Dark are kept separate, even though the names are so similar? I know that I've had conversations about the game with friends where they've said Black Magic when they meant Dark Magic or vice versa, and I've had to stop them to clarify exactly which one they meant. Which is never a good thing. And speaking about gripes with dark magic naming, what is with the Greek letters in the names of dak magic spells? What actually are they supposed to represent? What's gained by having them? Are they supposed to make the spells seem more mysterious and other? And if so, then why did they have several of them use letters that share a glyph with a letter of the Latin alphabet? Also, while I'm being petty about this, "Luna Lambda" sounds way too similar to "Lunar lander" in my non-rhotic accent and I'm entirely unable to take the spell seriously because of this.

But if that's the case, then how come there's the scandalised expression about Tomas actually being a secret dark mage? I looked up the part I was thinking of. After the mission where Tomas is revealed to be Solon, Rhea says "More importantly, I was shocked to hear that our own Tomas was actually a dark mage. I must reflect on our blindness." Which definitely seems to indicate that Rhea knows what dark magic is and doesn't like it.

I can see that it might not be something that's officially taught, that seems reasonable. But even then, it seems like something that Rhea et al are at least vaguely aware of. Not only in the sense of "how incompetent would you have to be not to keep track of what your new teacher is up to?" but also in that you can have a Dark Mage on your team directly in front of Rhea (in the Ashe & Catherine paralogue) or Seteth (in the Seteth & Flayn paralogue) and neither of them seem to care. It could definitely be something a little off the books ("Why are you teaching them about the Yuan Dynasty? That's not part of the syllabus!") but I don't think it's anything scandalous ("Why are you teaching them Satanic rites? That's really not part of the syllabus!")

Personally, I don't have a problem with a story leaving unanswered questions. If anything, I quite like it. It makes the world seem bigger and more alive if I feel that I don't know everything about it. When there's an answer to every question, that makes everything feel just a little bit too neat to me, a reminder that this is all just a story. Real life is never that neat. So for stuff like Rhea's Golems, I don't really feel that I need to know where they came from. I'm happy for that to be a mystery, with a few clues that I can try to piece together to make an educated guess. For dark magic, though, I think I agree with you. It's not just that it's left unexplained; some of the things we do see about it seem to be contradictory. I forget the exact wording used, but after Tomas reveals himself to actually be Solon, there's a line about how shocking it is that Tomas actually turned out to be a dark mage. Which makes it seem like it is something scandalous. Except that, as you say, it's something that we can have our students learn, which seems to imply that it isn't. It's a bit of a mess.

Oh, damn, I really love that idea and can't believe I'd never thought of the possibility of mastery spells before. Possibilities for what each class could have, if we're sticking to existing spells: Some of these might step on the toes of characters with strong spell lists, but since we're well into the realms of fantasy game design here, we can do whatever we want without any consequences. As for completely new and unique spells: And I'm now getting ridiculously far into the realm of fantasy game design (and away from the actual topic of this thread, which is what I always end up doing when I make a new thread to stop going off topic) so I will stop now. i like the idea though, and I think it could have worked well.

I had Marianne as Mortal Savant and Byleth as Holy Knight. For Marianne, I honestly think that MS is as good a choice as any. It gives her Swordfaire to use with either Soulblade or a Levin Sword+, but lets her keep her full spell list as well, which means she can switch to Blizzard when she can double with it and is also able to throw out Physic and Silence as needed. It's just a solid build. Holy Knight Byleth isn't anywhere close to optimal, but I felt like messing around, and it was still good enough to contribute meaningfully. Byleth is one of thew units where "just go Dark Knight instead" doesn't really apply, largely due to them having a harder time than anyone else gaining weapon ranks. They also get more use out of White Tomefaire than most since they get to combine it with White Magic Avoid. It's definitely not great, but it was a reason to use the class to do something that no other class can.

I like the idea of this, but I worry that it would end up with a situation where there'd be a small number of optimised builds or skills that you use on everyone. "Have everyone learn Death Blow and then put them on a Wyvern" was one of the aspects of Three Houses that I found least enjoyable, so I wouldn't want to see that repeated. So I'm going to suggest something that combines this idea with the skill capcity system from Tellius and the weapon strengths and weaknesses system from three Houses. First, instead of adding a new skill or ability as you level up, you instead add skill capacity as you level up. This could be 1 extra point of capacity every level, 5 poitns every 5 levels, or whatever other numbers work, but should be fairly regular. This capacity will be used not just for skills but also for weapon ranks, movement type, etc. Each skill (etc.) will have a base capacity cost, but the actual cost for a given unit to equip it will vary from unit to unit based on their personal strengths and weaknesses. So, for instance, the Steal skill might use 5 capacity by default, but only use 3 capacity for units who have a proficiency in thief skills and 7 points for units with a weakness in thief skills. there could also be some characters with a double weakness who would have it use 10 capacity, or some could have it as a personal skill and have it not take any capacity. This would allow for a few different benefits. Characters would mostly be encouraged to keep within their strengths (since they'll get more skills that way), but there's still plenty of space to take a quick dip into other skills when they have strong synnergy with what you're otherwise doing. It would also allow for units to still feel very different from each other by giving them a different set of strengths and weaknesses. Finally, while most skills could be freely learned by anybody, there could also be powerful skills that are tied to limited resources. So, you can only teach people the wyvern movement type if you have a spare wyvern, you can only teach them the meteor spell if you have a meteor tome, only teach them Aether if you have an occult scroll. And so on and so forth. Any thoughts? The overall idea here is to keep a lot of flexibility in how you build characters while also ensuring that units keep their personal identities and to allow for powerful abilities or combinations to exist without having them obligatory for every unit.

I've used Lifetaker! Admitedly, only while messing about on NG+ Hard, but I have used it. With the power of NG+, it's pretty fun to use on something like a Fortress Knight or a Wyvern Lord. Stick it on a Wyvern Lord and it can happily function completely autonomously, healing itself up from any chip damage it takes. Obviously, this wouldn't be even a little bit viable on NG Maddening. As for Heartseeker and Poison Strike, here's a wild idea. In the interest of seeing just how far we could push things before they break, what would happen if Dark Mage had both Poison Strike and Heartseeker as class skills and then also had both of those as mastery skills as well? Would that be overpowered? I'm thinking probably not. A class with two mastery skills would be unusual, but their are plenty of classes that have a skill and a combat art for mastery, so I don't think that it's too out there. Lamine and Lysithea are both at least Slitherer-adjacent, though. I mean, Hubert isn't a Slitherer either, and he gets the Dark Mage and Dark Bishop classes when you face him as an enemy. I do see your point, though, and you may well be right. Still, when it comes to speculation about design processes and developer intent, it's likely that we'll never know for certain. It could be that Gremory equally started off as a variant of Warlock, but then evolved from there, whereas Dark Bishop started out in the same place but didn't evolve as much. Who knows, honestly. I think that's an exaggeration. I think that most of the magic classes have a niche and are entirely usable, even in late game Maddening. (The most recent run I did was NG Maddening and had both a Holy Knight and a Mortal Savant in my endgame team, and both were putting in work.) If we're talking only about what's absolutely best then, sure, probably it's those three classes, but that's always the way. Unless the game balance is absolutely perfect (the game balance is never absolutely perfect) then there are always going to be a few options that stand a little way above the others. So I do think it's more useful to think in terms of viability than optimality. This might be a play-style thing, but I find that I seldom run out of spells like Ragnarok and Excalibur, even when I don't have Black Magic Uses x2. I don't often run into many situations where those spells can secure a kill but other spells cannot. They do come up occasionally, but not so often that I feel that I'm hurting for uses. I do agree with Thoron and Meteor, but as First Mate pointed out, for male characters, that largely just means Hanneman. Speaking of Hanneman, it's a shame that he's the male character who benefits most from double black magic uses, because in some ways, he's also the perfect choice for Dark Bishop. His later join time makes it harder for him to master Intermediate classes, so it's much more likely that he won't have Fiendish Blow already.

Sure. My point isn't that Dark Mage with Poison Strike is better than Mage without Fiendish Blow. My point is that Dark Mage without Poison Strike is better than Mage without Fiendish Blow. I don't think it's that unlikely. Remember that a lot of novice and casual players are going to be playing on Normal/Casual, which makes him a whole lot simpler to kill. I know that a friend of mine killed him in the first encounter just by throwing bodies at him and not caring that he killed several of them, because that's just a thing that you can do in Casual mode. This is a good point. It's not as terrible on Dark Mage, since almost everyone has bad movement in intermediate tier (although most aren't quite as bad as the magic classes), but it's definitely a problem with Dark Bishop. It might actually be one of those situations where they could have had the same skill as both the class skill and the mastery skill, as they do with Steal and Unarmed Combat. Interesting thought. If that is the case, I wonder if Gremory is the same way. That's also a class that I associate with TWSITD, due to it's real world inspirations and its associations with Cornelia, so that might have been a late addition too. Though, if it is, I wonder why they didn't make it require a Dark Seal. Because that would probably feel equally or more justified than requiring one for Dark Mage.

[Brought over from another thread to avoid derailing.] It's a fairly commonly-held view that Dark Mages and Dark Bishops in Three Houses are awful. I don't really disagree with this view, but I still want to defend them at least a little bit. First off, let's compare Mage and Dark Mage. They have identical base stats and almost identical growth rates (with Mage being marginally better thanks to an extra 5% growth in Charm). In terms of their class stat boosts, they are very similar, with Dark Mage having 1 more point of magic but Mage having one more point of res. Overall, this is pretty close, but I'd say that Dark Mage has the advantage. 1 point of magic is worth more to me than 1 point of res and a 5% higher charm growth. Now let's look at their class skills. Mage gets an extra ten castings of Fire whereas Dark Mage gets an extra ten castings of Miasma Δ. I consider these to be roughly equivalent. Sometimes the lower weight and increased accuracy of Fire is better; sometimes the extra might of Miasma Δ is better. The better choice mostly depends on an individual unit's inate spell list. For a unit like Linhardt who has both Fire and Wind already, I'd definitely favour Miasma Δ; for Hubert who already has Miasma Δ, I'd probably prefer Fire. Either way, it's a fairly marginal difference. However, Dark Mage also gets a second skill, whereas Mage does not. That skill, Heartseeker, offers some pretty neat utility. It's not something that comes up all the time, but can be relevant from time to time and is definitely better than nothing. Again, it's pretty close but Dark Mage is better. If all you care about is "what class gives my unit the best performance right now this second?" then you will generally be better choosing Dark Mage in most cases. Of course, this ignores one of the big reasons why people take the Mage class to begin with: its class mastery skill. Fiendish Blow is just a good skill. And what's more, Intermediate tier is usually one of the easier stretches of the game so you typically have plenty of space to focus on building for later rather than on what is good in the moment. (This is similar to why most people tend to recommend sending units through Brigand and not Cavalier, despite Cavalier having +2 move and Canto.) I don't dispute this. However, even considering this, I still think there are circumstances where Dark Mage is a reasonable choice. First is for any unit that isn't built to ORKO. For chip damage, Poison Strike (the mastery on Dark Mage) can often do as much or more than Fiendish Blow. Consider, for instance, Linhardt built for healing and support, but who contributes occasional chip damage when there's nobody for him to heal. Poison Strike is maybe a better choice for him than Fiendish Blow. Or consider Ignatz built for debuffing with Seal Strength and Break Shot. He'll typically do better with Poison Strike than with Death Blow. The second situation where Fiendish Blow isn't useful is when you don't actually get it. It's often taken for granted that any unit who spends time in Mage is going to master it, but that's probably not true for a lot of players. Not everyone knows that the meta is to use intermediate tier to pick up important mastery skills. Not everyone knows what classes give what skills. Not everyone knows to pick up the bonus to class xp from the Cethleann statue the second that the Saint statues unlock. I know that the first time I played, I didn't pick up very many class mastery skills because I didn't know what I was doing. I suspect that is true for a lot of players. Then that brings us onto Dark Bishop and comparing it to Warlock. Again, the stats are very similar. Dark Bishop has +1 to magic and dexterity; Warlock has +1 to speed and res and an extra 5% charm growth. The big difference between the two classes is their skills. In theory, both classes have a skill to boost their damage, with Warlocks getting Black Tomefaire and Dark Bishops picking up Fiendish Blow. However, one of the big reasons why Dark Bishop is rarely recommended is that Fiendish Blow doesn't stack. And of course, you already picked up Fiendish Blow by mastering Mage, right? Except that, as I already mentioned, not everyone who plays the game is going to have mastered Mage. And if you haven't mastered Mage then the two skills are fairly comparable, with Fiendish Blow typically being slightly better (+1 damage per hit and works with all magical attacks, not just black tomes, but does nothing on enemy phase. In terms of other skills, double Black Magic uses is nice but doesn't come up all that often for most units (getting a second use of Meteor for Hanneman is the only case where I'd consider it a major selling point), Miasma Δ is fairly irrelevant by this point, and Heartseeker remains neat but fairly niche. Overall, for units that haven't mastered Mage, Dark Bishop is at the very least competitive against Warlock. The sum total of all of this is that for casual or inexperienced players, Dark Mage/Dark Bishop is a solid and fool-proof option, whereas for players who know the game inside and out it still retains a few occasional niche uses. This is... not terrible. Not good, but not terrible. And not, I think, as bad as a lot of people make out. (Of course, this fails to touch on the other complaints about the entirely unnnecessary gender lock and the way that the classes aren't worth the effort of obtaining dark seals. I have no defence for these things.)

Dark mages in Three Houses are bad, but they're not that bad. If all you care about is power level now, then Dark Mage is just a straight up better class than regular Mage. Regular Mage is generally prefered because of its better mastery skill, but prior to mastery, Dark Mage is stronger. Similarly, Dark Bishop is a pretty good choice if you haven't already picked up Fiendish Blow from mastering Mage. Not just straight up better than Warlock, but certainly competitive. The problem with Dark Mage and Dark Bishop is only really apparent once you know the meta of picking up class masteries in Intermediate tier, and know exactly how to grab Fiendish Blow. For players who don't know that, then they're perfectly reasonable classes (though never great). (I also quite like some of the stuff that you can do with Poison Strike and Lifetaker in NG+, though admitedly that's moving more towards the "strictly for fun" side of things than the "actually good" side of things.) As to the main topic of the thread, I'd say that Ike's fight against The Black Knight in Path of Radiance fits the bill as something that is only really worth doing for story reasons and/or bragging rights. Getting to upgrade from Ena to Nasir really isn't much of a reward at all, since neither of them are particularly fantastic. Especially given that one of their primary benefits, the ability to damage Ashnard, is pretty much guaranteed not to be needed if you have an Ike strong enough to beat The Black Knight.

For Close Counter on Claude, I'd say it depends on whether you're allowing him to use hit-and-run kiting tactics with his high move and super canto. Building Claude without Close Counter only really makes sense if you're planning on using his mobility to stop him from ever seeing enemy phase combat.

I'm not trying to prove anything. I'm stating an opinion. Do I really need to preface every sentence with "this is what I personally think and it's OK if you disagree"? Because, well, what I said was what I personally think and it's OK if you disagree. The only part of what I said that I can reasonably see as being an assertion of fact rather than opinion was: "Losing your strongest unit/favourite character/whatever to something that isn't your fault isn't something that many people are going to find fun." So, OK, let me reword that: "Based on my observations of both my friends and people within Fire Emblem fandom, the impression that I get is that there are not very many people who find it fun to lose units in a way that don't feel like their fault." If you think that the impression that I have is wrong, then please tell me why. If you personally love having your units die to ambush spawns when you're doing ironman runs, then please tell me why. If you don't understand the point I'm making and would like me to elaborate, then please ask me to. Just saying that you disagree without any context or elaboration adds nothing to the conversation.