Character Balance?

[Mackc2]

The 3rd route is a bit more "atrocious" with base stats, granted, but in Hoshido/Nohr proper, the only unit that srsly can't hit the ground running is Mozume..I think, anyway.

Of course, this is on Normal, I've not compared generic stats in Normal vs Hard vs Lunatic yet though

The difference in difficulty increases towards the end of the game, (E.g. Chap 7 boss might have +1 hp, +1 strength, chap 27 boss might have +5 everything), plus skills, etc.

Enemy skills (seal skills are horribly debilitating, etc) are mostly absent in the easier difficulties, so that's another factor (enemies will also have rally skills to boost their own stats)

There are quite a number of squishy units (Hana, Elise), some less squishy units (e.g. Ryoma, Avatar, trained Mozume), and the actual tank units (Effie, Xander, Avatar with Dragonstone, maybe Crimson, Flannel)

In terms of Physical attacks anyway, on the magic side, you tend to invert (E.g, a fair amount of units can actually survive magic, but tanking magic is another story, but most of your magic glass cannons are sort of like Micaiah in that they just outright don't care about magic...sort of), so Xander gets whacked by magic pretty hard.

Dunno about the growths, since...well it's hard to say..

Magic has always felt a bit weird because five(four before fates) of the six(five) main weapon types use strength unless you have one specific weapon of that type but only tomes and staves use the magic stat (and staves usually only use it to determine range), so usually high resistance only ever helps you against the minority of classes.

[Featherwick]

Not sure if we're talking about the same bases here, or maybe our expectations are different

He'll be doubled and destroyed in 2 rounds by Endgame, maybe even 1 round.

But for coming back at ch 15 that's not bad. He's worse than a bunch of units, sure, but he isn't completely useless, like say Arran from 12.

Dagda can kill things in the final chapter of Thracia at base stats. Kind of a bad example lol.

True, he can kill, but he's really weak in terms of durability. He won't have enough speed to really dodge and all of the mages destroy him with his pitiful magic stat.