Rate the Unit 36: Anna

[Imuabicus der Fertige]

she bacc

 

Guidelines:

2.1.) mention the diffculty on which you rate the unit 

2.2.) what classes your unit went through, what skills they had and so on; don´t consider obviously suboptimal builds.

2.3.) no DLC rings, no non-unit DLC bonuses

2.4.) no grinding in skirmishes

2.5.) no rng abuse (no resetting for bond rings)

2.6.) cooking is allowed

2.7.) ratings to be given in the format X/10

2.8.) if it isn´t mentioned above, it´s fair game

2.9.) no "Kagetsu exists and obsoletes Lapis, 0/10", explain your rating

 

Unit: Anna

Class: Axe Fighter

                     Lvl   HP    STR   MAG   DEX   SPD     DEF    RES   LCK   BLD

Bases:          5     29      10        2        9       7          4          5       3        7

T. Bases:      5      3        1         2        4       2          1           4       2        0

Growths:      /      55      15       50     50      50       20        35      45       5

 

Personal Skill: May obtain 500G when unit defeats a foe. Trigger %=Lck.

Innate Proficiency: Bow

SP: 300

 

Support Bonuses:

C    Hit+15
B    Hit+15, Avoid+5
A    Hit+20, Avoid+5
S    Hit+30, Avoid+5

 

 

Tools and mo stats:

 

Average Stats - Fire Emblem: Engage (FE17) (triangleattack.com)

 

Engage Numbers - Google Tabellen

 

Rating: 4.5

Next unit on Thursday

Edited October 12, 2023 by Imuabicus der Fertige

[Armchair General]

She's mildly more useful than Boucheron, but I mainly used her for her personal skill, which is kind of funny, considering how mines was at around 21 Lck and it barely triggered for me.

[SumG]

Another unit that I really tried to make work, but never really could.  Again, I tried her on hard moving her into the mage path due to her high growths.  Even on hard I found her a middling option compared to other mages I was using.  On Maddening, her stats struggle to keep pace with enemies.  She suffers from the similar issues as Jean, in that her base class is not well suited to her stat growths, which means you have to make the decision between immediately reclassing (and not getting to a magic based class until IL 15 or so) or dawdling through a melee class  that she is not suited to for 5 or so levels.

One interesting idea that I've heard for an Anna build, though I have not tried it myself, is to view her as a Radiant Bow wielder in either Warrior or Bow Knight.  She certainly has the magic stat to support it.  I'd view her main competition for this role to be Fogado, and there could be at least some debate as to who function better in this role.  Anna should end up with a slightly higher magic stat at comparable levels, a lead that will slightly grow over the rest of the game, but Fogado will hold the edge in speed by a handful of points.  Ultimately, I'm inclined to favor the unit with higher speed, leading me to prefer Fogado in general, but I can certainly see how you might be able to swing it in practice.

Anna's personal ability is a contentious one, particularly on Maddening.  On Maddening, resources are tightly constrained, with a fixed amount of gold available and few ways to supplement it if you aren't playing online.  Some players enjoy the ability to get supplemental gold sporadically from Anna's personal, even if it is intermittent.  There are two problems with this, though.  First, Anna is not an amazing combat unit, which means it can be challenging for her to secure kills.  Perhaps she can fare better as an anti-flier unit using the build I discussed previously, and given the prevalence of fliers in this game that might be enough to get some benefit.  If you're particularly dedicated to it, you might be able to get 50-100 kills, which would translate to ~50,000-100,000 gold.  That sounds like a lot, but in the scheme of things it doesn't change all that much.  It might get an extra support level or two in one region on the map, but that's about it; most support levels will still be unattainable.  And the second problem is if you are judicious with how you spend your money, particularly in terms of how much country support you are offering, even without DLC or online supplements you shouldn't be hurting that badly for money.  These days when I play through Engage, I find my purchasing and upgrading is more often limited by the amount of bond fragments or ores I have instead of the amount of money I have.  So Anna picking up a small amount of gold really doesn't provide that much benefit.

In the end, I'll give her a 4/10 just on the basis that the Radiant Bow build seems semi-viable.  But broadly I think there are better options even for that role.

[vanguard333]

1st playthrough, normal difficulty.

Anna... she's a tricky one to rate.

I had no idea about her magic growth until after I promoted her, so I kept her as a fighter and promoted her into a warrior. In this role, she was fragile despite having good HP, and her strength, while not terrible, was not enough for her to really deal the necessary amount of damage to be a viable axe-wielding infantry unit. One of her biggest problems in this setup is her low build, as axes are very heavy, but she can be recruited early enough to be given the Leif Emblem and build+ skills, which helps her a lot in this area.

Eventually, I gave her the Hurricane Axe, hoping to utilize her magic stat. This didn't really work, as the Hurricane Axe, being a weapon that cannot follow up or strike first, was almost never useful. Finally, however, I got the radiant bow and immediately gave it to her, and she was finally a lot more useful. By this point, my team was set, so I pretty much had to keep her regardless, so I was really grateful that the radiant bow helped her a ton.

I can't rate how she is if reclassed into a magic class; I can only say how she is as a warrior. And in that regard, she needs a lot to be effective, and she won't be very effective for quite some time. Is it worth it once she has a radiant bow? ...I honestly can't decide.

It's difficult to decide, but I think I will give her a 5/10.

[lenticular]

When I used Anna, I had her as a Levin Sword Griffin Knight (on Maddening). While I wouldn't characterise this as a particularly strong build, it was definitely viable, and I had a lot of fun with it.

Ultimately, Anna is a growth unit. If you enjoy using growth units then you will likely enjoy using Anna; if you don't then you won't. That's about what it boils down to. Her bases would probably need to be a touch better for her to really feel like she was competitive for optimised play, but if you invest in her then she will hold her own. Excellent growths in magic, speed and dex mean that she will eventually do decently well for herself in any build that attacks with magic. Add a great luck growth to that and it speaks to a possible niche as an offensive staff user, making use of Divine Pulse. I've not tried that myself, but it seems like an interesting possibility.

[samthedigital]

2/10

Like Jean she's a growth unit that is terrible to start, but she doesn't have any of the staff or Qi Adept utility. On Maddening she kind of needs to have Micaiah to get to promotion. Once there she can go in Warrior with a Radiant Bow, but I'm a fan of reclassing her into Mage Knight. By the end of the game she's going to have a monster magic and speed stat, so she can be a fantastic Bonded Shield target once she gets going. I'm kind of torn because I want to give her a higher rating than Jean because I feel like she gets going faster, but it's hard to ignore the fact that we get a lot of ready to go units that don't need to spend time self improving before they're a competent member of the team. To be clear though the rating has more to do with her start than potential; I think that growth units are fun and rather easy to train in this game.

Her personal isn't very good with proper money management. In a vacuum having her as the main magic carry nets us enough kills to generate a decent amount of money I think, but the extra money isn't buying anything useful in my experience.

[SnowFire]

Lvl. 20/20 Warrior Anna:

57 HP, 25 Str, 20 Mag, 31 Dex, 30 Spd, 14 Def, 21 Res, 19 Lck, 11 Bld, 5 Move

Technically, Anna can promote to Berserker too out of the box, except this would be really dumb.  You're using Anna's great magic growth and settling for Hurricane Axe as the sole way to use it?  Might as well use the Bow talent to grab a Radiant Bow in Warrior, and pick any other physical growths unit for a Berserker if you want one.  (For all that it is annoyingly heavy - she's still weighed down by 1 even at endgame by it.)

--

Anna is Engage's growth character that can pay off, at least, more so than Jean.  I don't think she needs Micaiah to get levels if you're careful, although she absolutely does want an early promotion & probably a Second Seal, and likes Micaiah anyway.  Now, Mage Knight is a good class, so it's not breaking news if someone makes a good Mage Knight, but...  Anna makes a good Mage Knight.  She's got that combination of Speed and Magic to create a character who really, really hurts once she gets rolling, and her passive can be a cute quirk too come the second half of the game.  You can also make her a serviceable Sage if you want Staffs for that period when Micaiah is MIA.

You can also have her be inverse Clanne; while Clanne had physical growths in mage-y classes, Anna has magical growths in physical classes.  Her default Warrior build can absolutely work, especially on Hard mode, where she's threatening both Def & Res as required.  Tends to have less raw killing power than Mage Knight or Sage, although giving her a smidge of durability is appreciated I suppose.  I suppose you could go Griffin Knight as well for a hybrid option, although Flame Lance isn't really that great.  While this is workable, I didn't give Clanne or Celine a particularly high rating due to the woes hybrid builds run into on Maddening with dealing enough damage, so I'd definitely consider this the "backup" build.

Overall, I'll say 5/10, but a friendly 5/10.  If you want to pick a character to give some favoritism too, Anna is a very solid choice, as an early joiner with a relevant passive.  If you can get a built Anna into the second half of the game, her powerful magic doubles (whether with Elfire / Bolganone or a Radiant Bow) will wreck some stuff, so there is payoff for the slow start.

[Barren]

I didn’t comment on Jean for maddening because I really had nothing to add about him. Nor did I really use him on maddening. Anna whom I’m more familiar with I’ll comment on.

 

She joins you if you do one of the paralogue chapters during your time in Firene. Anna starts off as a axe fighter which is odd considering that she has the highest base magic growth in the game. Once promoted though she does make a decent mixed attacker with Radiant Bow and whatever axe you want to use for her. Her personal is triggered based on her luck stat so you could consider getting her luck + x from Byleth in order to get a higher chance to score money.

 

I’d give her a 5/10 because she is a growth unit that can be hard to use at first and maybe not recommended for those who want more efficiency. But she is someone that can reward you for your hard work so at least there is some kind of pay off (see what I did there?)

 

[Bartozio]

Ah, and finally we get to talk about Anna..., excuse me, lady Anna.

So lets start with the good. Anna has the highest magic growth in the game (not counting dlc), along with high speed and dexterity growths. In my own run I made her a Mage Knight (I just got her to lvl 10 axe fighter, then dumped a master and second seal on her), and she pretty much dunked on everything with a Levin sword, all the way up to the final chapters of the game. Which is to say, she two shots everything, even enemies with high res, and is fast enough to double most enemies. This makes her an ideal Bonded Shield sweeper, especially since her bulk is low enough most enemies will prefer targeting her. With that setup, she has claimed mvp for almost every map I played after her promotion.

Obviously a good part of that performance is just the Levin Sword, Bonded Shield and Mage Knight all being really good, but Anna's stats still make her arguably the best unit for that role. Not all units with high magic have the speed to double most enemies, and not all fast units have high enough magic to two shot all enemies. Anna has both, and with speed taker she can double even the really fast enemies like sword masters.

Even if you don't go for that specific setup though, she doesn't need Bonded Shield to destroy enemies on player phase. And even if you don't feel like using a second seal on her, she can make for a pretty good bow unit as a Warrior. Most flyers die to a hit from steel bow, regardless of the strength from the unit wielding said bow, so Anna's low strength isn't really a big issue there. And once she gets the Radiant Bow, she'll actually deal more damage than most other bow units. In particular, Wyverns are very difficult to kill with physical bows, but with a forged Radiant Bow it's fairly doable. I managed to hit those thresholds with Lindon reclasses to Warrior, so I have little doubt Anna can reach them as well.

So now that we've talked about the good, lets talk about the bad. When Anna joins she's underleveled compared to the rest of your army, and her stats as an axe fighter are all around lower than Boucheron's bases, despite him joining at a lower level. In most games that would a death sentence in terms of usability in an optimal run, though in Engage it only really means she needs about 2 good chapters of having the Micaiah ring equipped to reach promotion level and enough SP for Canter.

That might sound reasonable enough, but keep in mind that depending on when you play Anna's paralogue, you might not even have 2 chapters left before chapter 10. If you're not planning to use Jean or any characters from Brodia youshould be just fine, but otherwise it can become a bit of a puzzle on how to get everyone ready for the midgame.

Still, considering you'll likely want to have someone spamming Micaiah when the ring is available anyway, and Anna turns into an amazing unit with some investment, I don't think she's a bad unit. Just one that comes with a bit of a prize tag. So I'll give her a 6/10

[Jotari]

In my Maddening run I took one look at her base luck and her personal skill, laughed and sent her to the bench.

 

I decided to use her in my no Emblems hard mode playthrough since bond Rings favor mages more. I think I made her a mage right away and ended up being one of my best units. I didn't have any real speed trouble with her like some people mentioned. She was one of my most reliable killers (my most reliable killer was Dire Thunder Gregory, but of course that's Dire Thunder). Her defense was always her shakiest stat, but it wasn't really troubling to keep her out of harm's way. Of course these are issues that could be exacerbated on Maddening. Still, I used Citrenne in Maddening who was very useful to me and was lowly ranked here, so maybe my playstyle just appreciated a solid punch of magic more than most.