Serenesforestlies

I made Lysithea a Fortress Knight to make her more able to take hits with Pavise and to raise her base defense. Here to report she is a terribad fortress knight, her low hp and defense means the enemy can cut through her like butter and her low strength means she can barley dent anything (on hard). She can master the class very quickly with the item that gives the extra job points and her passive. It is nice when Pavise triggers and saves her bacon, which triggers often (not that I try to let her take hits as a mage). It's probably better to avoid strength classes with her though lol. I am trying to get everyone to a "B" in fist weapons so I can avoid carrying healing items or healers on maddening. It's worked out okay, although as you would expect I'm behind on class mastery because of the fist focus. It also makes it hard to hit some enemies reliably when you have a D or C in the weapon you're using (in paralogs) around Remire Village time. They throw so many enemies at you, it's nice to find a good spot and healing focus and clear them out.Thankfully, my characters have all of their past lives skills that matter, so it helps balance out their weakness.

I agree on the difficulty of 3 houses. You are on point. I was thinking the exact thing you said in my maddening run. Maddening kills the fun, they need a 4th difficulty. However, I cannot in good conscious agree that Fates is better, it's much worse. All of the campaigns should have more than 1 difficulty. Why tie an entire game to 1 difficulty? That killed the "choice" in Fates for me. Oh you want hard conquest? Too bad. Oh you bought Conquest, but like the other story/characters better? Give us more money. The story in Fates is horrible. The main character continues serving her evil father for..reasons? I could never justify in my head why the MC would go back to her evil, abusive adoptive father. It's not really clear other than the story needs it to continue. So heavy handed. I got tired of it and quit early on in Fates after beating Awakening. I recently tried Fates again, and had the same issue. The game isn't likable. Oh, and you have to buy the game 3 times to get the whole story! They both have cheesy anime cliche characters, it's really personal preference, but I like that there's a lot of mystery to the story in 3 Houses, even if we rarely get a satisfying resolution. I don't like that Fates has pure evil and good (at least as far as I got). 3 Houses main characters (outside of a few characters that "slither in the dark") are all shades of grey. Much more interesting. Fates has too many weapons/items with tiny differences and everything costs way too much. Progression is slow. It has a stupid "garrison chores" base building mechanic which is sooo of that time period and it's just as repetitive as exploring the monastery. Especially if you consider assaulting castles as a chore you need to do. And the fact you can recruit a level 99 person to your team from someone's castle in the beginning is odd. Yet outside of the MC, all of my characters felt weak AF. I don't like staves running out of charges either. All of the weird gemstones and class changing scrolls. There's a lot of feature bloat. The Dragon Veins were a mechanic that was not fun imho and arbitrary. Most of the time it was either flip the switch or you lose, or it is pointless, but only select characters can touch them. Dragon form in general was strange, as I was given a super weapon early on that let me double attack, where the dragon could only attack once for half the damage, despite my "dragon specialization" I chose. Your're not wrong to like Fates more, I'm sure many do, I just can't agree. I a general dislike more than Awakening is why Nintendo kind of redid many aspects of the formula with 3 Houses.