lenticular

My point isn't that increasing stats is good. If you increase your stats then that will make the game easier and will potentially allow you to succeed with strategies that would otherwise have failed. I do not dispute this. My point is that the game is sufficiently lenient and has sufficient margin for error that it was never necessary to rely on these borderline strategies in the first place. For instance it is absolutely possible that giving +1 speed to all your units might allow Annette to reach the speed breakpoint to allow her to double enemy swordmasters, and this might allow her to secure a one turn kill that she otherwise wouldn't have been able to hit. However, this is completely irrelevant if you could instead secure a one turn kill with Felix or kill the unit by attacking with both Annette and Mercedes or use a gambit to disable the swordmaster and then kill him next round. In this case, having the extra point of speed isn't really helping you beat the level; it's only giving you more options for how you do so. (I also think that it's a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison to compare Rallies to the boosts from cooking, given that Rallies give a stat boost that is 4 times as large. Also, if we're specifically talking Rally Charm then it's worth noting that the food buff that gives charm doesn't actually require fishing.)

That's fair. I don't really think of Three Houses as being a resource management game, but if that's the lens that you're viewing it through, then yeah, it's a pretty lousy one. I guess I think of the monastery parts of the game as being more like a life sim. There are some basic bare-bones minigames in there, but they're pretty straightforward and -- for me at least -- not really the point. I view the monastery as primarily being aboutstory. Or not even that; I think of it as primarily about characters. Yeah, there are some basic minigames there too but they're not why I'm there. This somewhat gets into questions of authorial intent, which always tend to get messy. I'm not sure I'd agree that it's presented to the player as being a resource management system, because that's not how it came across to me. I play both resource management sims (eg Banished, Surviving Mars) and raising sims (eg Long Live The Queen, Growing Up), and the monastery portions of the game came across as much more akin to the latter than the former to me. I think it is fair to say that if the monastery was intended as a resource management system then it didn't really succeed at that; it's also fair to say that if it wasn't intended that way but came across that way then there was a failure to communicate the intent behind the game. Yes, it gets you resources that you can't get from anywhere else, but my point is that you don't actually need those resources. You need to fish if you want to be able to cook the +speed meal, but you don't actually need to be able to cook the plus speed meal. You can get through the game perfectly fine without it. You can get through the game perfectly fine without hitting professor rank A by chapter 9. And sure, there's an argument that game devs should protect players from themselves, but that only goes so far. It's also a player's responsibility not to play in ridiculous anti-fun ways. If you choose not to fish, all you are doing is making the game slightly harder. You're not locking yourself off from any content. There aren't any characters that you can only recruit if you fish, any chapters that you can only play if you fish or any support conversations you can only view if you fish. Just a slight increase in difficulty. For a player who is struggling to make it through the game (on whatever difficulty settings or self-imposed challenges they're playing by) then I can certainly see why they might feel that they absolutely had to fish and might resent that fact, but I certainly don't see that Alastor is struggling in his currecnt play through. First, if you find the fishing minigame fun then you absolutely should play it as much as you want to. You're not the only person who finds it fun. I have a friend who typically hates basically every fishing minigame in every game ever, but for some reason actually enjoys the one in Three Houses. There's no accounting for taste. If you enjoy it, then that's great! It's there to be enjoyed. The point that I'm trying to make is that people who don't enjoy it really shouldn't feel compelled to do it anyway. As for the rest of your comment, well, obvious statement is obvious, but: Fire Emblem is not Pokémon. And perhaps even more to the point, single-player Fire Emblem is not competitive Pokémon. In competitive games, it makes sense to eke out every tiny advantage that you can because your opponent is probably doing the same. Games can and do come down to absolutely razor thin margins. Single player games don't work like that. The challenges that you face are always going to be at the same predictable level, and once you've surpassed that level, you are going to win. Having an extra point of speed might occasionally allow Alastor to use strategies that he wouldn't be able to, but it isn't going to alter the final result. He's going to beat the game either way. If you want to use a Pokémon analogy, let me ask you this: do you need to breed a full team of pokémon with perfect IVs in order to beat the Elite Four? No, of course you don't, because the Elite Four just aren't that difficult. If you built a perfect competitive-viable team, grinded them all to level 100 and then took them to the Elite Four then you'd get nothing but a big anticlimactic letdown.

All you're really demonstrating, though, is that if you deliberately play the game in a way that isn't fun then the game won't be fun to play. Which is true but hardly something that needed a demonstration. Pretty much any game can be played in a way that stops being fun if you really put your mind to it. And OK, so you do a lot of cooking together, but do you really need the bullheads? Is it really that imperative that you have that extra point or two of speed? If you didn't have it, then would any of the upcoming maps become so much harder that you wouldn't be able to get through them? Or so hard that they'd be frustratingly difficult to get through to the point where you'd have less fun due to how hard they were?

OK, sure, but... why? It's not as if doing all that fishing is meaningfully increasing your chance of beating the game. It's not as if you needed to do more fishing to decide how you feel about it. It's definitely not that you're doing it because you enjoy it. So why are you doing it?

I think that there needed to be some sort of display of divine power from Sothis very close to the beginning of the game, though it needn't necessarily have been time rewinding. But if you just completely removed the time powers from the script and didn't replace them with anything else then I don't think that Sothis's story would have worked. Having a big show of power right at the start shows both Byleth and the player that this isn't just some weird halucination. It's something real and it's powerful. I think that was necessary for later events (Sothis being revealed as the name of the Goddess, Sothis merging with Byleth to escape from the void) to make sense and not feel like they came completely out of nowhere.

Well, there's a lot of a difference between drawing inspiration from multiple different characters as compared to just a single character. If a character is drawing inspiration from King Arthur, Robin Hood, Peter Pan and Legolas then they aren't really an expy of any of them. They become their own thing. Pretty much any creative work is going to be inspired by multiple other works. The greater the proportion of inspiration that comes from a single source, the more likely it is that the character is going to be creatively lazy and/or legally dubious. There's also a big difference between copying a folk tale or work that's in the public domain (eg Robin Hood, Journey to the West) and copying a character whose IP is owned by a corporation that is notoriously protective of said IP. Artistically, there's little difference between ripping off Robin Hood and ripping off Mario; legally, there is. It's also worth noting that while a lot of characters that are straight rip-offs of other characters do exist, many of them have been created by companies who have legal teams who can advise them on exactly how close to the line they can get before reaching the point where they start infringing on trademarks or copyrights. And sometimes they end up going to court anyway, like the time Universal tried to sue Nintendo because of how similar Donkey Kong is to King Kong. You seem to have some sort of a sense that what you're doing is somewhere close to the line of what is and isn't acceptable. I'm assuming that's why you were asking about copyright in the first place. And if you're anywhere in that vicinity, your only options are to get proper legal advice or to just risk it. Personal anecdotes and pages on TVTropes are fine for creative advise, but they're worthless when it comes to questions of exactly what is and is not copyright. My advice, for whatever little it's worth, would be to give up on any idea of commercialising your project. Once money starts changing hands, that just opens up multiple different cans of worms that you almost certainly don't want to deal with. If you keep it as a hobby project then you can much more easily just focus on the creative and artistic side of things and not worry about the legal side. (Which isn't to say that you would be completely protected from legal consequences if it's a hobby project. You wouldn't be. IP infringement is still IP infringement. But it would decrease the risk of things going bad and make it a whole lot easier to extricate yourself from if they did.)

Honestly, if you're hoping to turn this into a commercial project or make money off it in any way (for instance, through Kickstarter) then you really need to go and see an actual real lawyer about it rather than just a bunch of random Fire Emblem fans on the Internet. Partly because laws and requirement can be different for commercial use compared to personal use, but also because once you start taking people's money then you have a burden of responsibility to them and you need to be able to say with complete confidence that you know you aren't going to have to take down the entire project due to legal issues. On the other hand, if it's just going to be a small hobbyist project that you're doing for fun then you can probably get away with doing whatever you want. Nintendo probably won't see your project and if they do then it will probably be too small for them to care about it and even if they do then they will probably just demand that you take it rather than trying to sue you for it (and if they do then you absolutely just take it down immediately and without question regardless of whether you think you are legally in the right because you absolutely do not want to be in a legal battle with a huge multinational corporation). And if you aren't satisfied with all those probablies and want a more definitive answer, then you're back to the point where you need to get advice from a lawyer. Intellectual property law is incredibly complicated, and if you find someone randomly on the Internet who says they can give you a simple yet definitive answer then they're either lying to you or they're deluded.

The best version of an ironman is the one that you think you will have most fun with. There isn't a Central Ironman Committee that determines a single codified set of rules that everyone must adhere to if they want it to be a "true" ironman. I do think that using the Ashen Wolves would make the game a little easier than not using them, though. Partially because they're good units, but mainly because they're extra bodies and are also free to recruit. If you're really keen on doing the hardest possible ironman then I'd probably say not to use them, but if using them seems like more fun than not, then I'd say to use them.

The part that really interests me here is the 50% chance of success that you gave. Personally, if a strategy had a 50% chance of success then I'd consider it a wildly risky strategy. If you have a 50% success chance on every chapter, then that means that you will have to reset an average of once per chapter. If we assume a game with 25 chapters, then that would means that we'd expect to reset 25 times and have less than a 1 in 30 million chance of getting through the game without any resets at all. For comparison, if we want to have a 50% chance of getting through the full game without any resets, then we would need approximately a 97.3% success rate for any given chapter. This is probably more in line with how I generally tend to play (or at least, with what I aim for; I often end up with lower success chances because I make mistakes). I don't mind if I have to reset once or twice due to RNG over the course of a game, but if we get to the point where I'm having to reset repeatedly only to do the same thing and hope that I have better luck next time, then I'm going to stop having fun. None of which is to say that my way of doing it is the one true correct way, of course. Different people are going to have different tolerances for what level of RNG they're willing to accept. Some people will prefer a quick and elegant solution with a 50% success rate while some will prefer a more methodical approach with a 97% success rate. And still others aren't willing to accept anything short of a 100% success rate. None of these approaches are inherently superior to the others but they will yield different answers for tier lists or for "worst unit" discussions. I mean, that's pretty much the point of this conversation, no? I'm not going to single-handedly come up with a method of ranking Fire Emblem characters that is satisfying to everyone. If there's any way for us to collectively come up with something better than what we already have then we're going to need to discuss it and have different people talk about what they like and dislike about different ways of ranking units. I think that looking it in terms of drafting has a problem in that it over-values units who are mediocre performers in important niches. Consider, for instance, a mediocre healer. You might be very happy to be able to draft them since even a mediocre healer is much better to have than no healer at all. However, outside of the context of a draft they might easily be a unit who you would normally never use if there were a couple of other healers available who were better. The same could be true for characters in chapters with very few deployment options (eg, Radiant Dawn 2-1) except that my understanding is that most drafts tend to include those characters for free. But then that brings up another problem if the ranking of a unit is dependent on the exact rules of a draft. I think that if I had to come up with a universal grading method, I would use a combination of "how much harder would the game be if this unit didn't exist?" and "how much harder would the game be if this unit were force-deployed for every chapter they are available?" Or maybe I would consider each metric on a chapter-by-chapter basis and then take an average. However, fundamentally, I don't really believe that it is possible to create a single grading system that covers all units and all ways of playing the game. For instance, I think that a tier list for a draft should be different from a tier list for an ironman run should be different from a tier list intended for people who have never played Fire Emblem before and are struggling through a casual playthrough on the easiest difficulty level. These different ways of playing the game will value different qualities in a unit and I think that we are better off acknowledging that. It would be much more helpful to have multiple tier lists (eg "drafting tier list", "iron man lunatic tier list", "new player tier list", etc.) than a single tier list; it is better to specify a worst unit for a specific purpose than to try to state a single worst overall unit. Sure, but there's a lot of space in between "no grinding" and "infinite grinding". If a unit requires that you baby them and field them kills for a couple of maps after which they become incredibly strong, then that's substantially different from a unit that requires twenty levels of dedicated grinding and multiple stat boosters to reach the point where they're even competitive with other units.

It's also possible to just use SpotPass encounters to get Donnel off the ground, which is considerably quicker and easier. Sure, but "just use Nostank Robin" equally invalidates most units in Awakening. Sure, grinding can benefit anyone but it doesn't benefit everyone equally. Donnel (with Aptitude) has fantastic growths. If you use him, he starts out behind everyone due to his poor bases, but then overtakes them due to his outstanding growths, but then he hits his caps before everyone else at which point everyone elses catches up with him. In terms of just raw stats (i.e. not accounting for things like class availability, parenting, etc.), his power curve starts low, then becomes high, then finishes off somewhere fairly average. Well, people are welcome to judge that way if they want to but that's certainly not how I'd think about it. To me, starting from the Branch of Fate is basically using New Game+ to skip part of the game. Which is a perfectly reasonable way to play, but not something that I would automatically assume. Yeah, I don't really like "efficiency" as a concept because it's always so vague and poorly defined and everyone who uses it seems to have a slightly different idea of what it means. I think that a lot of the time when people say "efficient play" what they actually mean is "with a play style similar to how I [the speaker] play". It's not too fully optimised like an LTC or a speedrun, but it's also not doing infinite grinding. It's just... somewhere in the middle, between those two extremes. Which isn't very helpful. Whereas I look at it more like this: for most metrics of "optimal" or "efficient", you can split units into two groups, those that you should use at some point in the play through and those that you shouldn't use. For any game (or any route) there are going to be multiple units that fall under "don't use". For these units who never see combat, there needs to be some way of differentiating between them if we are to choose the single worst unit in a game, and I see out-of-combat contributions as one useful way of doing so.

But even general performance isn't well defined. At the very least, it's something that varies greatly over the course of the game. Who's better, a character who is all-but indispensable for a single chapter but that you never use before or after that point, or a character who will perform reasonably well for the whole game but is generally eclipsed by other units and is easy to beat the game without? And that isn't just a hypothetical situation. One of the units that people have mentioned for worst in his game is Mycen, and yet he's an extremely useful unit to have in the prologue. It might be possible to beat the prologue without him but it would be much, much harder. Or another example that people have brought up is Rinkah. She's not as important as Mycen, but she's one of only three available units for chapter 4 of Fates. Not using Rinkah definitely makes the game significantly harder. Of course, you could say that you don't care about performance for just one or two chapters and that it's only long-term potential that units should be judged on, but where exactly do you draw the line? Jagen has very little long-term potential but I think that few people would call him the worst unit in his games. How many chapters does a unit have to meaningfully contribute in for them to not be in consideration for worst unit? Does it make a difference whether that chapter is at the start of the game or the end of the game? If Mycen and Rinkah are bad because they only contribute in one or two chapters, does that also mean that characters like Gotoh or the laguz royals (in PoR) are equally as bad? And then there are growth units. People have brought up Donnel, Rolf, and Amelia, for example. Almost by definition, how good a growth unit is will depend on how much effort you're willing to put into raising them. This is especially relevant for Donnel and Amelia, both of whom are from games with infinite grinding. They're going to be rated considerably difficulty in the context of a no-grinding playthrough compared to a grinding-allowed playthrough. And then you've also got to factor in non-combat performance. Lorenz (Three Houses Lorenz, not Archanea Lorenz) unlocks the paralogue that gives you Thyrsus. Lyre unlocks base conversations that give you a Howl scroll and a Daunt scroll. Even if they never see a single combat, these are still useful contributions. In Fates and Awakening, there's also the consideration of passing skills or classes onto other units. And so on. In short, pretty much every unit in Fire Emblem has both up sides and down sides. This makes it all but impossible to directly compare units, because the worst in one set of circumstances isn't necessarily going to be the worst in another set of circumstances.

I'm not convinced that "worst unit", viewed in a vacuum, is really a meaningful concept. Worst at some particular task or role, certainly, or worst by a particular well-defined metric, but not just "worst". As such (and because I'm feeling a little contrary today): Sacred Stones: Orson. He's only around for one chapter and he steals xp from other units who could use it. Path of Radiance: Giffca. Yes, he's an overpowered demigod, but the opportunity cost of using him is that you don't get to have a flying overpowered demigod. Radiant Dawn: Oliver. He's yet another filler unit whose only real use cases are "because I like him" and "to show that I can" but unlike certain other units who are in that position, he also doesn't come with any unequippable skills or any base conversations that he unlocks. Shadow Dragon: Marth. This is a game that goes out of its way to make sure that you never run out of units, which means that everyone can be sacrificed, risked, or put into dangerous situations. Everyone except for Marth, who you need to handle with kid gloves because he's the only unit who carries a lose condition. Awakening: Olivia. In a game that's so fond of ambush spawns, having a non-combat unit is just a liability. Fates: Shiro. Part of the point of the second generation units is to be able to replace lost units whenever you need them. Shiro fails at this because of the bad late-game scaling of his paralogue that means you have to take risks or use resources to be able to recruit him. Shadows of Valentia: Faye (prologue version). I don't know how they're coded, but the prologue kids certainly act as if they're different units to their grown counterparts. They're all terrible, but Faye is the worst of the bunch. Three Houses: Edelgard. She's a trap unit. Yeah, there are other units who can be taken away from you mid-run, but the game doesn't push you as heavily to invest in them.

I am practically certain that this one isn't possible, having spent a fair bit of time trying to get it to work when I did a "don't use any items" run of the game. Jeralt won't move from his starting position until some of the enemies are dead, enemies won't attack him there even if you bait them into range and he's their only target, and then he's also specifically programmed not to be able to kill Kostas but always leave him at 1hp instead.

There's very little romance in Three Houses, and most of what's there is restricted to the post-game. There's a romance between Byleth and a character of your choice, but it only shows up as explicitly romantic in a single post-game scene, and only if you choose it; you can also choose to stay single and not do a romance at all if you prefer. Beyond that, there are a few supports throughout the game that have a little bit of ambiguous flirting. Some character endings refer to romances between the characters, but that's literally just a sentence or two of text. The only thing that I can think of in the game that is potentially embarrassing or cringeworthy is a gratuitous boob closeup in one of the opening cutscenes, but your mileage may vary.

I don't think that there really is a core experienced that's completely divorced from the social features, though. My Castle is just too heavily integrated into the game. Even if you choose never to visit anyone else, you're still left with a situation where the amount of resources that you get from your own castle is determined by how many chapters you play per day and the effectiveness of most buildings varies depending on who was RNG assigned to run them at the time. You could just never use My Castle -- or at the very least never use the most affected buildings like the smithy or the mess hall -- but then you're back with the same problem as Three Houses, in that you can't really know for sure to what extent they're needed until you already know the game inside and out.

Not only those things, but also just access to basic resources, as well as significantly easier and earlier access to accessories like the chef's hat and arena shield. None of these are absolutely required, of course -- it's still perfectly possible to beat Fates without any of this -- but they do provide a pretty significant boost.

All of which is entirely reasonable. I think it's all born out of a feeling that what we got just isn't quite right somehow and could have done with being tweaked a little. The exact nature and direction of the tweak is up for debate and there are probably multiple potential changes that would have worked well. I really wish that modding on Switch were less onerous, because I would love to try my hands at a vanilla+ or community balance patch style of mod if it weren't. Oh well. It's definitely a reasonable choice, for sure. My point was mostly that you aren't just comparing Wyvern Rider against Warrior/Grappler and Wyvern Lord against War Master, but that there are several levels where you'll be comparing Wyvern Rider against War Master. Of course, there are a few circumstances (mainly "I have no other fliers") where Wyvern Rider would still be the prefered choice, but I think I would mostly prefer War Master.

I remember when Three Houses first came out, a lot of people immediately looked at the monastery and thought that it was going to age poorly and be really tedious when replaying the game. But, somewhat ironically, I think that replaying actually helps the game overcome some of its issues. If you know the game well, it's a lot easier to judge what monastery activities are required (very few) and which are easily skippable (most of them). This leads to a situation where a player can, more or less, take part in whatever side activities and grinding they personally find fun and skip all the rest. I agree, though, that the "use it or lose it" approach to opportunities for grinding is a bad one and not one that I ever want to see brought back. Having to know the game well in order to know what can safely be skipped is not a good solution. This is something of an intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation thing. It's very different to want to do a tea party because you find the activity enjoyable and fulfiling in and of itself as opposed to wanting to do a tea party despite not enjoying because it makes your stats go up. The former is something that the player will look forward to ("ooh, yay, I get to have another tea party now!") whereas the latter is something that the player is likely to grow to resent ("ugh, I need to do another tea party to get my charm up"). For myself, I intrinsically enjoy most of the monastery activities, but there are a few that didn't work for me at all (tea parties and fishing especially) and I do them very rarely and very begrudgingly. As for My Castle, I'll say that the two main things that I disliked about it are stuff that's gated behind the passage of real time and stuff that's gated behind the online/social aspect. Both of those things really soured the experience for me.

There was a thread about challenge runs here a couple of months ago that you might want to check out to see if any of the ideas there take your fancy. I would second this. You can go as far as completely banning the monastery (except for when it's forced) and still end up with a very playable game, or you can allow for a few bits and bobs for quality of life (eg, dancer, saint statues) if that sounds like more fun to you.

For Alois in particular, you're not just working against the bane but also starting off further behind. Typically speaking, I will get most of my would-be wyverns to C rank flying to have a guaranteed certification the instant they hit level 20. 10 levels worth of combat experience to climb up to (for instance) B rank flying then seems reasonable. With Alois, I'm imaging that you'd maybe get him into Wyvern Rider at something like D rank flying at level 23. That would give you only 7 levels worth of combat if you're trying to certify for Wyvern Lord immediatley at level 30, and would have him needing to go from D to B which is about 50% more wexp than going from C to B. Which does raise an interesting question: what is the optimal number of fliers to run, and to what extent does this vary by route? I know that I typically run either 3 or 4. Usually I'll have one each of Wyvern Lord, Falcon Knight and Dark Flier, then sometimes a duplicate of one of them or Claude as Barbarosa if I'm doing Verdant Wind. That isn't really based on trying to optimise, though, and is more because I find class diversity fun and having everyone in the same class to be boring. Even so, by that point, I'm finding that I'm getting diminishing returns on the extra utility that flight offers. Extra mobility is always good, but the amount you gain from adding a first flier to a party of infantry is massively more than what you gain from going from three fliers to four, for instance. Then there's the eternal problem of flying battalions, which further disincentivises adding too many fliers. This means I mostly judge units' wyvern potential based not on how good they are in the class but on how much they gain from it compared to other units, though I do recognise this isn't the only way of approaching the question. So, how many fliers does everyone else tend to run? And do you do so based purely on optimal performance, or do you have other subjective criteria like I do? I think that the existence of monofocal classes is fine; I think the problem with them is how steep the certification penalty is for not reaching the target. Just changing it from 40% drop-off per missing weapon level to 32% (to match other advanced classes) would make it much more practical to certify at only B rank , which would make the requirement much less onerous. For Wyvern Rider, I almost wonder if they should have just moved it down to Intermediate tier. Get rid of Axefaire, nerf its stats, change the requirements to be equivalent to Pegasus Knight, and then give it a better class mastery. I quite like with Pegasus/Falcon Knights that there isn't a natural option for Advance tier, which means that you have a character that is super strong in Intermediate tier, then mediocre in Advance tier, before becoming super strong again in Master tier. It could have been interesting if they'd made that just be a thing for fliers. I generally enjoy having different characters and different class lines have their peaks and troughs at different times, since it means that more characters have their time to shine rather than just having a single character be "the best" for the entire duration of the game.

He's a Bishop. She's a Wyvern Lord. But can they learn to do each other's jobs? Find out on an all new season of Class Swap, coming this December, only on Fox! These are both Wyvern Rider builds more so than Wyvern Lord builds. Especially for the hypothetical flying rallybot Ignatz. I can see the argument for Wyvern Rider for that build (even if I'd never use it myself because I don't value rallies), but struggling through a flying bane to get into Wyvern Lord at the same time as trying to rush S rank Authority doesn't seem worth it. For Alois, if you do put him on a wyvern then there's not much reason not to try to train him up for Wyvern Lord, but I imagine he wouldn't get there until after level 30, during which time it would be a comparison between Wyvern Rider and War Master, which I find a tough sell. There's nothing inherently wrong with putting him on a wyvern and he'll perform well if you do; I just find it hard to justify when War Master is such an obvious choice. This is a concrete example of the point I was making. Even seemingly "bad" Wyvern Lords are at least usable.

You've done it. You've broken the meta! Pure genius! If you ever do a run with Bishop Petra and Wyvern Lord Linhardt then I absolutely want to hear about it. My assumption is that 8 movement, flight, canto, and a magic attack that has three range a base 19 might (inclusive of axefaire) is enough to be not-terrible (though definitely not worth the effort), but practical results trump theory. Yeah, there is definitely room for significantly more nuance than I had in my list. Though I'd probably call the hypothetical tier "if you really want to" because it amuses me. Honestly, though, a big part of why I didn't include a fourth tier is that I think it's difficult to decide where to draw the line. Like with Bernadetta, I agree with you that there's no compelling reason to put her on a wyvern, but at the same time, I'm sure that if you did so then she'd perform decently well. So, should you put her on a wyvern? Well, if you want to. There are a few other units that I think fall into similar territory, like Ignatz, Yuri or Alois. I wouldn't recommend putting any of them on a wyvern, but if anyone wanted to do so then I'm sure they'd turn out absolutely fine. You also run into issues of how to weigh ease of access to the class against perofmrance once you get there. And then maybe also consider route differences. Maybe Crimson Flower Alois is "if you really want to" but other-routes Alois is "if you want to" because he has more time to overcome his flying weakness? It's non-trivial, anyway, which is why I kept my tier deliberately extremely broad. How is it a "clear" upgrade? There are ways in which Wyvern Rider is better, certainly, but also ways in which Death Knight is better. For instance, Death Knight can use non-flying battalions and adjutants; Death Knight has better HP, Str, Def and Res; Death Knight has Lancefaire instead of Axefaire which is relevant in a route where available named lances outnumber named axes, as well as Jeritza's better starting Prowess skill in lances and better lance combat arts; Death Knight has magic access (not a big deal, admitedly, but occasionally useful); etc. Personally, I'd say that which is the better choice depends on personal taste and playing style, as well as what other units you're using. For me, at least, I find that having one or two flying units is hugely impactful but that going from, say, four fliers to five offers far less benefit. Flight is always still good, but once you already have a couple of fliers, adding more is no longer game changing. Plus, when you already have other fliers, you start to run into problems of access to strong flying battalions. And, well, I probably already have Edelgard and Petra as wyverns if I'm playing Crimson Flower. Since it was pointed out that Jeritza starts out at C+ axes and not E like the source I was looking at claimed, I'm no longer particularly down on Wyvern as an option for him, but I also don't see it as a clear and objectively better choice.

No it isn't. It was certainly flawed but that's not the same thing. I absolutely should have included HP+5 but didn't think to. I don't see why it's difficult to believe that I could just make a mistake in my numbers, especially since I don't run Vengeance builds myself so am not used to optimising them. Anyway, if you think that I'm arguing in bad faith then there really isn't a whole lot of point in me continuing, since nothing I could say would change your mind.

I couldn't remember what his starting rank in axes was so I looked it up. SF main site lists him as not having any starting rank in axes. If that's wrong and he actually starts at C+, then yeah, I can definitely see a much stronger argument for it. Probably not something I'd bother with myself, but I can see the argument, especially given the non-cavalry-friendly terrain in CF endgame. There are certainly some in my "If you want to" tier where it's a better idea than others, but it's a sufficiently strong class that you can't really have a calamitous Wyvern Lord. You can have mediocre Wyvern Lords and not worth the effort Wyvern Lords, but I can't see anyone being truly awful. Not in the same way that, for instance, Bishop Petra is truly abysmal.

Has anyone actually had Jeritza as a Wyvern Lord? I can't say I've ever tried it, but it certainly sounds pretty terrible. He starts out with no ranks in Axes or Flying, and he's the joint latest recruitment in the game while being exclusive to the shortest route. You only have him for 6 chapters in total, which is not a lot of time to train. Then even if you do get him into the class, its stat boosts aren't that impressive since they're competing against his personal class which is also very strong. Not quite as good as Wyvern Lord, but still excellent. And his unique class also comes with Lancefaire instead of Axefaire and has magic use, which can be useful for throwing out an occasional Heal or Thoron. Anyway, my own personal list would probably look something more like this: Should I put this character on a wyvern? Yes: Edelgard, Hilda, Petra, Seteth. Probably: Annette, Cyril If you want to: Everyone else. I admit that my own personal list is probably not the most useful.