Early master seal picks

[Barren]

I’ve been doing some practice runs for this game on maddening lately. Been putting it off admittedly because other games have been coming out for me to play and it’s been in the back burner for me. But I do want to get back into it soon, one run with DLC and one without.

 

During some of my practice runs I’ve given master seals to Alear, Chloe and Anna early on. Then Lapis, Diamant, Alcryst and Ivy. 
 

For those who have done their maddening runs, who did you give your master seals to early on that worked out for you?

[Dark Holy Elf]

I assume by early master seals you mean the ones in part 1, since you get a bunch more in early part 2. Combine that with the fact that deployment slots fall around then and you should be able to promote everyone you plan to use for Chapter 12.

If I was making recommendations I'd generally probably suggest the following:

Alear should be promoted by the start of Chapter 11. Chapter 11 has a win condition of bringing Alear to a certain point, and it's smoother if Alear is at least move 5. You can use the one you get from the Chapter 10 boss (the fourth one) if you'd like, or you can promote them earlier.

Chloe just has great part 1 combat and snowballs easily, both times I made her one of my early promotions I was extremely happy with the result.

Mage Knight has great magical offence out of the gate, and the earlier the promote the earlier you get Chaos Style which makes their offence even better.

I don't think either of them are great units, but both Diamant and Lapis should be promoted if you plan to use them longterm because their base class is bad, a backup with no ranged weapons.

[Barren]

Yes I was talking about pre chapter 11. Sorry I wasn’t clear.

 

I’ve heard about Chloe as a mage knight but I never tried it. Chaos Style I know is a great ability. I want to give it a shot for next time.

 

For Lapis and Diamant, it’s one of those cases where I want to use them long term because they can just instant promote and they can get 1-2 range for Hero and Successeur respectively. I like giving Lapis lances since they don’t weight as much as axes do and her build is bad. Build +3 does help a little but. At least she’d be able to wield steel weapons without being weighed down.

 

Diamant at least gets access to a tomahawk by chapter 11 and a killer axe by chapter 10 so he at least has a case to where you could argue that he’d be an okay investment.

 

[Imuabicus der Fertige]

Honestly, I feel like an idiot but Chloe hasn´t worked for me.
Gave her me MS and she was just what you´d expect from a flying horse unit. Fast as fuck, frail as hell (except Res if memory serves, duh) and weak as shit. And then I gave her a crit engraved forge and she still didn´t kill shit. And I know I gave her stat boosts, just have to look up what drops when, but I think I remember 2 STR boosts. Wouldn´t recommend, but that´s what I get for believing in Big Palla Propaganda.

 

I´d guess if you grind out the early armor (Louis?) guy he´d make somewhat of a decent bastion early on.

 

Noone you get before The Sand Kingdom TM and a bunch of it´s goons too are worth keeping that can´t be easily replaced, barring the usual big names.

Sell them seals, I say. Disrespect common FE wisdom. 

Edited March 6 by Imuabicus der Fertige

[FashionEmblem]

My personal choices:

1. Chloé:  Early flier is a great target for the first Master Seal. Even more move/mobility, more speed, and more offense. Also a good opportunity for Chloé to gain access to swords as either a Griffin or Wyvern, and she is a good candidate for the Levin Sword.
2. Citrinne: The staff utility gained on Sage or extra movement as a Mage Knight are neat. Levin Sword access as a Mage Knight is a cheap forge and strong in the early/mid game relative to tomes.
3. Boucheron:  This is more about Warrior being good than Boucheron. Can be done more effectively with Etie and Amber, but they also need a Second Seal. Anna can do Warrior well, especially with a Radiant Bow, but you have to deal with catching Anna's level up. If you have DLC, it's actually pretty easy to get Boucheron enough speed and build to double the dragon's in Tiki's paralogue with the Long Bow to one-round them in enemy phase, which makes that particular map much easier.
4. Diamant:  Gaining Hand Axes improves his early/mid game a lot thanks to 1-2 range backup. But, Diamant is a unit I've ultimately been pretty disappointed with in the long run—his stats just can't keep up.
5. Alear:  Promoting Alear before Chapter 11 is nice so they can have more movement for escape. However, they are usually my 5th promotion, which means they get the seal gained during Chapter 11 itself in my playthroughs. For what it's worth, they do need to be promoted in order to gain access to the Wyvern Ride minigame in the Somniel after Chapter 11, which gives some early bond fragments before fishing really opens up and items which can be sold (the Pure Waters are quite good if you are running Enchanters from DLC).

I stand by the above in my experience aside from Diamant whom is probably best relegated to the bench after Chapter 11, thus should be left unpromoted.

The additional promotions I would consider are:

1. Céline: Gaining staff utility is nice, especially since I dislike Framme and am happy to bench her ASAP. Thing is, if I promote Chloé to Griffin and Citrinne to Sage, that staff utility is already covered. Overall I'd say Céline is worse than Citrinne because Céline is supposed to be faster but weaker, but is not fast enough to perform particularly well, unfortunately.
2. Amber/Etie: Mentioned them above alongside Boucheron, but they deserve their own shout-out. They are both characters with lopsided stats very focused on strength. This is good in Engage—it's usually much easier to focus on patching up concentrated stat weaknesses or lean into points of strength in Engage than trying to take overall ok units and make them great. I put them lower in priority because they actually work fine without promotion throughout the early game. Amber has horse movement and works fine until more seals become available. Etie prefers Warrior to Sniper (though, a Lyn!Sniper!Etie can put in work with patched speed and high-range Astra Storms) but does appreciate the covert tag for hiding amongst the trees in Chapter 11, so she doesn't particularly need to rush a promotion or reclass.
3. Alcryst: A lot of Alcryst's power comes from Luna, so rushing promotion for the skill is not an unwise choice. However, Alcryst needs time to grow into a Dexterity stat that can make Luna more reliable, so there isn't actually much bang for your buck in rushing.
4. Lapis is pretty similar to Chloé stats wise, though with notably weaker magic (i.e., she can't Levin Sword her way around her low strength stat). Unfortunately for Lapis, she starts off as a Sword Fighter, so getting her into a better class line for her stats (e.g., Wyvern Knight) requires a Second Seal, whereas Chloé need only promote. Plus, this batch of units joins with low initial SP and Chloé has had the opportunity to snowball in the prior chapters and outclass Lapis at join. Lapis can also make a beeline for Hero's Brave Assist with an early promotion. Also, a Swordmaster Lapis does have good stats if instant promoted—she can double the Sword Fighters in Chapter 8.
5. Anna has the lot of potential to grow well with good magic and speed growths, but suffers from joining underleveled. She's a project to train up to promotion, and her contributions in the meantime, aside from chain attack utility (for which she does not gain experience), are mediocre until she promotes and either gains bows as a Warrior or tomes from a reclass.

Edited March 9 by FashionEmblem

[samthedigital]

I've always given at least one of them to Alear so that I can have them fly through chapter 11. Otherwise I'll use them on whoever I feel like using at the time, and I've tried every character at least once. If you're just playing through casually it's going to be more important to work out to use your emblems and resources to make the characters that you want to use succeed. If you want Citrinne to be your carry for example work out how to get her to one round enemies (give her resources to double if you don't want to spend time rerolling for bond rings) and go from there. I find that it's easiest to do this with units that have one stat that is really good and one that needs fixing, but realistically you can use anyone to some capacity and have almost any unit be a juggernaut.

[Bartozio]

1st playthrough (can't remember my third, lol):

- Chloe to Wyvern knight. I was honestly pretty happy with the results I got from this, though I did give her Lyn for most of my playthrough. I've also heard she does really well as sword griffin knight or even a mage knight.

- Alear. I honestly wasn't too impressed with them in their promoted class, so halfway through the game I reclassed them to Wyvern and had them use Lucina to guard the rest of my flyer squad. Honestly, they get decent combat stats as a Wyvern, but I think they're far more useful in a support role. Which means I don't they're a priority to promote, but if you're dreading chapter 11 it would help with that.

2nd playthrough

- Lapis. I instantly used a second seal to get her into Wyvern, and dumped a bunch of sp books and levels on her for Sword power 2 and Canter. Later I gave her Lyn and a good forged sword. She was easily one of my hard carries, though as you can probably tell, most physical units could likely do similar when giving that much resources. I would highly recommend focussing your resources on making a few good combat units though, considering there's only so many good emblems to go around and things like a dancer and the Byleth ring strongly favour having a strong unit to get more turns.

- Anna to Warrior and then straight to Mage Knight. With a Levin sword and some speed support from meals she could one round basically every enemy throughout the whole game. Well, later on she needed some procs to get speedtaker going. I paired her with a cavalry unit using the Lucina ring, and she could usually clear out entire parts of the map on enemy phase. I've heard most mage knights can do this, so I'd highly recommend getting one and trying it at least once, lol.

- Celine. Getting an extra staff user was nice, though I don't think it should be a high priority for your first 3 master seals at least. She's very useful as a support character, either just using staves, or when making use of Corrin or Micaiah later on, but none of that requires her to have good stats or promote early.

In general, I'd recommend using the first 3 master seals on whoever you want to matter the most in combat, since they'll need the stats the most. I think using more than 6 units from the early game isn't too great, considering the low number of deployment slots in Solm and the fact that you get some really strong prepromotes. So the second batch of master seals can just go to whoever is left that you're planning to use.

[Dark Holy Elf]

On 3/6/2024 at 10:58 AM, Barren said:

I’ve heard about Chloe as a mage knight but I never tried it. Chaos Style I know is a great ability. I want to give it a shot for next time.

To be clear, I've never tried it either; I was speaking of Chloe and Mage Knight separately in my post. I'm slightly skeptical of Mage Knight Chloe just because I find that the magic benchmark to ORKO most enemies with tomes is reasonably tight; you can do it but you need a pretty good magic stat, or a lot of investment in that direction, but some people seem to have gotten good results (and obviously Levin Sword + Sword Power is always an option).

On 3/6/2024 at 12:32 PM, Imuabicus der Fertige said:

Gave her me MS and she was just what you´d expect from a flying horse unit. Fast as fuck, frail as hell (except Res if memory serves, duh) and weak as shit. And then I gave her a crit engraved forge and she still didn´t kill shit. And I know I gave her stat boosts, just have to look up what drops when, but I think I remember 2 STR boosts

Chloe's got pretty average def and above average HP so she's not particularly frail, particularly in Wyvern. The strength can definitely be cause for concern; she's a unit who is helped notably by the well IMO since now she can just grab Sword/Lance Power for her killing needs, and not needing much speed support is certainly appreciated.

On 3/6/2024 at 12:32 PM, Imuabicus der Fertige said:

Sell them seals, I say.

I might be missing something but I don't think you can; they don't show up in your regular inventory. Which is a shame because you often do end up with some extras. (If there's a way to sell them I missed, I'm all ears; I've been known to miss strange interface options before. I don't want to talk about how long it took me to notice you can pick up bond fragments from your achievements on my first playthrough...)

 

[samthedigital]

16 hours ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

To be clear, I've never tried it either; I was speaking of Chloe and Mage Knight separately in my post. I'm slightly skeptical of Mage Knight Chloe just because I find that the magic benchmark to ORKO most enemies with tomes is reasonably tight; you can do it but you need a pretty good magic stat, or a lot of investment in that direction, but some people seem to have gotten good results (and obviously Levin Sword + Sword Power is always an option).

If you give her Eirika and the appropriate amount of support through skills and forges she can do quite well assuming you want her to be one of your main damage dealers. Spirit Dust will probably help too. It is something of an investment technically speaking, but it's not something unique to her. Personally I like to transition from Griffin Knight when/if I no longer want her staff utility and give her Corrin instead since I find that the utility role fits her better, but that's just me.

Edited March 8 by samthedigital

[Dean]

Not much love for Amber in here. With promotion, his base stats are good enough to ORKO generics and bosses straight after his join, and high strength + ability to inherit Sigurd skills lets him fill a niche for... basically the whole game.

Amber, Citrinne and Chloé are usually my recommendations for the first three Master Seal, with Alear getting the chapter 10 one.