Board 8 > Gauging interest in a Fire Emblem ranking topic

(+) Yeah! (+)

Safy from Thracia?

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I think that's a pretty good guess

8. Safiya/Safy (Thracia 776)

Safiya is unique among the units on this list in that she has effectively no combat whatsoever. While she technically can fight after promotion, no one is going to bother with that. I guess she technically can serve as capture bait for some AI trickery if you want (and empty her inventory of stuff the enemies can yoink) but there's no lack of people that can do that. It's kind of fitting really. The unit that can't fight allows you to rarely have to.

Joining fairly early with C rank staffs (and most of the way to B already), Safiya is the first person (and only person until at least chapter 14, likely a but longer) that can get to A rank staffs and thus have access to the almighty Warp staff, which the game is kind enough to give you at the end of chapter 7 (if you did something specific several chapters earlier, of course, because this is Thracia 776 we're talking about). If you've played Shadow Dragon, you know how Warp is infinite range in that game. Well, it's infinite range in this game too. And given that seize is the most common objective...well, an awful lot of maps can be ended in an instant with a single warp (rescue trade Leif to the boss killer or vice versa, warp them, drop the unit being carried, then kill boss and seize next turn) or two (warp boss killer and Leif separately, kill and seize turn 1). To say this is game breaking would be an understatement of incredible proportions.

Of course, that precious Warp staff has only three uses and you don't get another for quite a while. Sounds like a problem, right? Well, not exactly. Because Safiya, for reasons I can't fathom, joins you with the Hammerne staff already in her possession. It has 5 uses and is only usable by her. And so Safiya can actually fuel your warp shenanigans all the way until you start getting more of the staffs to play with all by virtue of her magical fix it staff (since broken staffs/weapons stay in your inventory in this game, you can break a warp staff then repair it to full uses, unlike in later games where you need at least one use left on the item or it just ceases to exist, so every Hammerne use can be 3 extra warps). Because you definitely don't need any meaningful limit on infinite range warp, am I right?

Even going beyond the warp skip applications, staff users in Thracia are super broken. Status staffs have infinite range and work on anyone with less magic than the user, allowing for full screen instant sleep/silence that never wears off, shutting down potential problem enemies instantly. Rescue erases all bad situations. Rewarp lets you move yourself around to anywhere safe, making it easier to reach villages if you care to. And of course, the Hammerne is a monster in any context. See, Thracia is full of super strong personal weapons (or even non-personal ones, like the brave axe). Orsin's Bhuj (formerly known as Pugi), Fin's brave lance, and then there's the bullshit on a stick that is Tina's Thief Staff nabbing items from across the map. A single Hammerne replenishes any of these crazy tools to full use on the spot, giving you the freedom to abuse them even more. While Safiya won't be the only person contributing to the late game staff spam shenanigans, she's still a contributor to it, and Hammerne remains her unique tool for the whole game. And of course she has plenty of time before any other A rank staff user joins.

To tip things even further in her favour, Thracia 776 is a game that really, *really* heavily incentivizes you to warp skip it. Warp cheese on chapter 12 lets you capture Salem before he uses his sleep staff, giving you extra sleep uses to play with when he joins. A little warp trick in 12x lets you prevent Tina from breaking her Thief staff before you can even get to her, once again giving you more uses of it to play with yourself. Then there's chapter 22 where leadership stars mean every enemy on the map has an effective +42 hit/avoid. No one wants to play this map conventionally because it's a total RNG shitshow, but a little staff spam solves all problems. Even if you do want to play it semi-normally, you'll need some staff cheese to remove 10 of those leadership stars (and thus 30 hit/avoid) right away just to save your own sanity. 17A has a similar gimmick. Then there's all the maps with multiple ballistas with heavily overlapped ranges and/or positioned in range of a dozen enemies, making for a RNG fest to tackle head on because no unit can actually survive a hit from everything there. OR YOU CAN USE THE WARP STAFF! Problem solved!

Thracia has undeniably the most overpowered staffs in the entire series, and as the poster child for them, Safiya takes the top spot in her game and deserves her place as one of the best in the entire series. Only the fact that she eventually has to share center stage with many other staff spammers keeps her this low. With a lengthy time being your only warp user and her exclusive Hammerne access, she has an incredible amount of utility that no other unit in the game can hope to match, and even when other staffbots join you still will need her services for maps like 24 and Final, where things look dicey on paper but enough high magic high staff rank units can erase almost every potential threat from existence with zero effort, planning or even need to move. She both breaks the game and lets you skip past many of its highly aggravating maps, and while I'm not really factoring in the latter for the purposes of this ranking, it's certainly not a bad thing!

Up next: From one unit who exploits a specific mechanic of her game better than anyone else to another, we move on to the ultimate Fire Emblem glass cannon

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FE11 Caeda?

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I love learning just how broken staffs are in Thracia 776.

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Mewtwo59 posted...

FE11 Caeda?

I think that is also a pretty good guess!

7. Caeda (Shadow Dragon)

When you remake an old game and you change some mechanics, like ditching the ancient weapon level stat for the modern weapon rank system (can you believe weapon rank used to be a stat you had a growth for like any other?), sometimes you have to make some adjustments. Like, for example, when you had a pegasus knight in the original who had the weapon level to use Jagen's silver lance for some reason, you kind of have to adjust that, especially with the new system where ranks from C and up provide additional bonuses. Might feel a little weird to have two units join in chapter 1 (we'll be ignoring the prologue here since it only exists on normal difficulty) with B rank lances instead of just the old guy, right? But then, that's kind of an unfair nerf, isn't it? Maybe she should get something else to make up for it...

Enter Caeda and her new personal weapon, the Wing Spear. A lighter and more accurate Ridersbane (Shadow Dragons fancy name for the Horseslayer/Beast Killer/Knight Killer, man this weapon changes names a lot) with 10 crit and 8 more uses, and of course, it's also effective against armor knights for some reason. It's basically the traditional "rapier" style weapon, except in lance form and belonging to someone other than the lord. And stronger than the rapier is. And it doesn't face weapon triangle disadvantage against damn near all its targets. Right away you can tell this thing is kind of monstrous. And you can get more of them! There's two or three of them buyable in addition to the one she starts off with.

Two factors beyond just its stats combine to make the Wing Spear a godlike weapon. First off, Shadow Dragon being a pretty faithful remake means it maintains the very repetitive enemy composition of the original game, meaning you fight cavaliers, knights and horsemen (basically bow knights) constantly. Starting with chapter 4 it's no joke to say that probably 70% of the enemies in the game are one of these classes, including most of the bosses. Second, the forging system in this game is incredibly generous and powerful. Unlike in the Tellius games where you essentially just get to create brand new, strong versions of basic iron/steel/silver weapons, in Shadow Dragon you can forge stat boosts onto almost any weapon you already have. This includes effective weapons, which get +3 damage vs their intended targets for every point of might forged onto them. Forged Ridersbane is such a potent tool in this game that lance rank is one of the most important stats, and a forged hammer or two can be nice to have as well. And then there's the Wing Spear, which is both of those things in one.

All this time talking about the weapon and barely anything has been said about the girl who wields it! Caeda herself is your typical pegasus knight, with low strength and durability but high speed. While Shadow Dragon's avoid formula doesn't allow for dodge tanking, her speed is nonetheless an incredibly valuable asset. H5 enemies are not easy to double for the vast majority of units, leaving Caeda in somewhat special territory for being able to double almost everything. And while her strength may suck, the fact that she doubles and can use effective weapons for harder targets means her damage output is either good (when not using effective weapons) or overwhelmingly amazing (when using the Win Spear). Her durability remains a legitimate problem, but again manages to be acceptable in context - surviving multiple hits is not easy in Shadow Dragon, particularly early on, and she doesn't get outright one shot except maybe by some bosses, but you get a Seraph Robe before that can be a problem. And the promotion to dracoknight carries with it huge buffs to HP, strength and defense, fixing her problems pretty much forever.

What this all adds up to is a lethal offensive unit that serves as the premier boss killer in the game, and in a game like Shadow Dragon that lends itself to being warp skipped, that's one of the most important roles you can fill. Even when you're not, her ability to just delete tough targets, ORKOing enemies with ease in a game with mostly low enemy density but very high enemy quality, is incredibly valuable. And of course she can fly, which is less powerful than in many other games in the series but still allows her extra flexibility in positioning and the ability to reach locations other units can't. Or, if bows or magic or the dracoknight's low speed cap ever become an issue (and that 23 speed *does* have some drawbacks in the late game), she can always reclass to paladin for some extra resistance and a higher speed cap while retaining her lance rank and Win Spear. You could even probably have some fun as a swordmaster using forged Wyrmslayers, since she has the speed to actually double manaketes up until their speed gets too high for that to be possible for anyone. It's probably not optimal compared to just being a paladin/dracoknight and using the dragonpike, but hey, she should be able to pull it off.

What lets Caeda take this spot while Thracia's premier nuke Asbel had to let Safiya take center stage is that staffs are nowhere near as potent for non-warp purposes in Shadow Dragon and your first warper has a shorter term monopoly on it (and much, much later access to Hammerne, though she gets even more uses on it than Safiya did), preventing Lena from being as dominant a force. Caeda also has better availability, and while she's not the best unit in the first three chapters with all the axe users running around she's still good. And finally, Thracia's hidden mechanics with crits mean that a lot of units *can* be boss killers, they just have worse odds than Asbel (who still needs the RNG to favour him sometimes, notably against the overpowered asshole Gomez in 8x). No one else in Shadow Dragon can outright guarantee ORKOs on bosses like Caeda can, often relying on super unlikely crits to be able to do it, making her relatively more important in warp skip play, and significantly more valuable for most of the game in more conventional play.

Marth may be one of the weaker lords in the series, but he certainly picked a powerhouse to marry.

Up next: A unit that doesn't get nearly enough credit in discussions like this, too often being dismissed unfairly for reasons that many units of his kind suffer from

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Gotta be a Jagen... FE7 Marcus?
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Yeah, either FE7 Marcus or Seth. Titania would fit too if the clue didn't say "his". Gonna go with Marcus because Seth should probably be a couple spots higher.

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Seth gets a lot of credit for being strong so I don't think it is him.
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Good old Jagens. This write up might take a while to get to the point <_<

6. Marcus (Fire Emblem [Blazing Sword/Blazing Blade])

The history of "Jagen" units in the Fire Emblem series is an interesting one, but perhaps not as interesting as the history of their perception in the community. While a new player would naturally feel inclined to think the unit that joins with significantly better stats than everyone else is the best, for a long time the community pushed a mindset that focused on growths as the most important thing for determining how good a unit was. By this metric, the traditionally low growth early game crutch units seemed like traps, there to steal your precious experience and drag down your team in the long run, leaving you weak when they inevitably fall off. For many years, Fire Emblem fans taught each other to minimize use of their Jagens. This mindset did have some cracks from the beginning with the so called "Oifay" archetype, referring to an apparent Jagen who actually held up long term, a seemingly logical idea that closer inspection reveals is very hard to define as a truly separate concept due to how wide a spectrum there is for long term Jagen viability, and those cracks deepened with the trend towards Jagens with high growth rates kicked off by Sacred Stones, but by and large this was the prevailing opinion of the community for many years.

Eventually though, the tide started to turn. While it's hard to point to any one single thing, I like to think the release of 0% growth fan patches for the GBA games, allowing you to play without stat growth for a challenge, had something to do with it. Enough people in the community played these kind of patches for it to start to become common knowledge that not only did using your Jagen unit heavily in the early game not prevent you from being able to handle the late game, but also that their base stats held up much longer than people had originally realized. A unit like Dagdar in Thracia, once written off for his pitiful 10% growths in relevant stats, was suddenly looking pretty good once people saw that his base stats alone were enough to be a solid combat unit in almost every single chapter in the game, and his overwhelming durability and strength made him a beast in the early game. The discussion of Jagen units still continues to this day and may well continue forever, but by now most of the community recognizes at the very least that the strong early contributions of these units make them among the more valuable in many games.

And this brings us to Marcus in FE7, younger and stronger than the old man he was in Binding Blade. At first considered little more than an early crutch, the passage of time has steadily improved his standing in the eyes of many, yet the old school mentality still seems to hold surprisingly strong when it comes to him. While people are far more likely to appreciate his truly monstrous bases and great weapon ranks these days, not to mention his always great paladin class and all the mobility it brings, there remains a strong sense that he is a "Jagen" rather than an "Oifay", dominant for a time but irrelevant in the long run. Even among people who acknowledge his status as the best unit in the game, Marcus is often viewed as earning that status entirely for his beastly early game performance, where he mows through enemies like nothing while the rest of your army stands in awe of his superiority, and considered a unit who still has a relatively short shelf life. But is that truly the case?

Before we get onto that question, let's first take a brief look at the part everyone agrees upon. Marcus starts out as a beast, with all of its stats except defense surpassing every other member of the army, generally by quite a bit. His 15 strength towers over the competition, especially since his 11 speed allows him to double most enemies through the first few chapters while the next strongest unit, Oswin, has a paltry base 5. 31 HP and 10 Def allows him to survive 3-5 hits from early game enemies at a time when most of the army dies in 2, and even Hector and Lowen need to level up a bit to catch up. His A lances, A swords and B axes lets him turn the weapon triangle to his favour in almost any encounter, and means he can reach S rank lances quite early for a free +5 hit/crit with them. And he does it all on a 8 move horse, allowing him to charge ahead and destroy enemies before anyone else can even get in range, not to mention letting him abuse rescue and canto to help reposition your other units.

Mowing down enemies, nuking bosses and never dying, no one can deny that Marcus is a monster at first. But how long does that last? You'll often see comments claiming that his low 25% speed growth holds him back a lot, as by the time you get to the dread isle he's not doubling nearly as much anymore. Clearly that's a sign he's starting to fall off, right?

Well...yes and no. Obviously he's not quite the god he once was, but the thing about enemies in that chapter 17-20 stretch is they're actually fairly fast by FE7 standards. You encounter a lot of nomads and cavaliers who don't weigh themselves down with anything heavier than iron. These enemies are actually fairly hard for many units to double. Even a guy like Kent has issues here unless you fed all of Lyn mode (plus the knight crest, possibly) to him. Lyn can double, sure, but she also can't survive more than one hit, 2HKO anything that isn't weak to the Mani Katti, move more than 5 squares or counter at range. Guy lacks the Mani Katti and has better strength/durability but is still pretty similar. Raven can do it of course but Raven is a uniquely powerful combat unit, and even he needs to level up a bit before he can promote and finally have a real enemy phase.

So Marcus, with his incredible strength and great weapon ranks and high durability, is actually still your best combat unit here. He doesn't ORKO everything, but no one does. He does ORKO a lot of stuff, and takes big chunks out of the rest (with high accuracy, always a help against nomads in forests, not to mention that tricky Uhai that few units can challenge safely). And he does it all, as always, on a horse, with all the benefits that brings. Then after chapter 20, enemies start being much more likely to carry heavier weapons, notably loving steel weapons. Enemy AS actually decreases a bit in the mid game. Some of Marcus' reputation for falling off likely comes from people projecting his decline in the number of enemies he can double onward and assuming he's past his prime, when in truth, doubling actually gets easier again and he's back to being fine.

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An important thing to note here is that Marcus' growths may not be high, but with his high bases, they don't need to be. 25% speed is pretty low, but when you have a base of 11 and 11 AS doubles a decent number of unpromoted enemies throughout the game and 14 AS doubles almost everything...well, suddenly it doesn't look so bad, does it? Despite his low experience gain, Marcus can see so much combat and get so many boss kills that he does actually level up at a decent pace, and it only requires him to reach level 13 on average to hit the 14 speed mark needed to be good for basically everything that isn't 32x and Final. His 15% defense growth sucks, but with a base of 10 and respectable HP growth, it's enough that he doesn't get 2HKO'd by much of anything ever, especially if given the chapter 15 dragonshield (as the unit who sees by far the most combat over the next few maps and who isn't legitimately immortal, just close, he's by far the best candidate for it). 15 base strength and a 30% growth never goes out of style, and his resistance base and growth are both legitimately good.

What this all means is that, contrary to all the talk of falling off a cliff, Marcus remains a perfectly viable combat unit all the way up until chapter 32. He certainly does get worse, no longer being your premier boss killer and often not being the best choice against the strong promoted enemies. But most of the combat in FE7 is not against these powerful foes, it's against wave after wave of much softer targets, and Marcus is able to wreck these mooks without much issue. Even against enemy heroes, his silver lance hits can put in work against these foes that few can ever double, and he always retains a niche as a strong answer to magic units. His combat stats may be worse than other units, but they're good enough to get the job done, and that's what counts. There's no difference between 42 damage and 50 damage if the enemy only has 40 HP, after all. And since his combat is good enough, he remains worth deploying to his high movement letting him do it sooner than other units, not to mention the rescue utility it brings.

He does pretty much become useless for 32x and Final. EXP thief confirmed?

This got even longer than I expected, and I expected it to be long, but Marcus is maybe the character I find most interesting to discuss in the entire series. His early game dominance is as simple as it gets, but his late game performance is, once you really look into it, a great example of how there's more to Fire Emblem than just looking at what stats people end up at and calling it a day. On paper he might be losing to all kinds of units in all kinds of ways during the mid game, but in practice if he kills the enemies before most of those units get in reach, who is really the better unit? I'll give you a hint - I've just spent a disturbing amount of time writing about him. Even among people who recognize his greatness I think he still often gets underrated, and hopefully this massive discussion of how and why he's able to hold up longer than you think has illustrated why.

Up next: A much shorter write up <_< The best unit from one of the games where rating units is the absolute hardest to do.

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Robin?
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Awakening is easy to rate units in. "Robin good, Frederick good, Galeforce access good, everyone else meh, let Donnel die" There, summed it up in no time!

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Radiant Dawn Haar?

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That was my thought as well.

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Since I'm more of a casual player, another thing that makes me pause when using Jeigans is that I don't get to see weaker units grow as much. I kinda enjoy seeing them level up and the thrill of the RNG stats by themselves.
But point taken about Marcus!

RD does seem right, since the chapters are spread weirdly.

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Yeah my goal when talking about the strengths of a unit like Marcus isn't to say you necessarily should use him, just to try to make people aware of what the benefits are when making the choice of whether to do so or not

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5. Haar (Radiant Dawn)

Quite the change from a good but not great late joiner in Path of Radiance, huh?

Radiant Dawn can be tough to rate units in with how all over the place availability can be. It's not uncommon for a unit to be super broken but only playable a few times, or super broken for a few maps and then kind of shit later on, or anywhere in between. That issue doesn't really crop up for Haar though, who is one of the most available units in the entire game. His two maps in part 2 make up for the two he misses at the start of part 3, putting him on par with Ike and the rest of the Greil Mercenaries. And of course, he's good. All the time. Always.

Haar is downright unfair in part 2, being borderline invincible and killing all kinds of stuff, and of course 2-E is a map that heavily favours being able to fly. In part 3 he "slows down", by which I mean he's actually somewhat mortal and not quite as lethal, though his durability is still incredible, helped by the baffling decision to make wyverns only weak to thunder magic instead of arrows, and his offense will always be at least good. He's known for having some speed issues, and it is true he will miss out on doubling some enemies, but with his durability and strength (and the difficulty of ORKOing that exists in much of Radiant Dawn) it doesn't exactly hold him back, and if you can arrange for him to get the part 2 Speedwings and possibly an early Master Crown, his speed will usually suffice to double a fair bit. He can cap HP, strength, skill and/or defense relatively quickly, which also allows him to abuse the BEXP system of guaranteeing exactly three stats on a level up to cheese out some extra speed as well.

Beyond just being a monstrous combat unit, Haar happens to bring the power of flight (in a game with combat canto, no less) to many maps that benefit immensely from it. 2-E has been mentioned already, but there's also the swampy portions of 3-2 and 3-7, the supply burning mission 3-3 whose entire design is invalidated by flying over everything, the mountains of 3-4, the obnoxious pitfall bridge and half of part 4, in addition to the standard ledges and forests and such that he can ignore. There are so many maps that you can beat quicker and/or easier by just flying past troublesome spots, whether you're rescue dropping someone like Ike into position or just going off to kill stuff, and Haar is the only flying unit for several of them and the best or second best flying combat unit for all of them.

It's commonly noted that Haar falls off a bit in the endgame. This is...sort of true, in the sense that he's not the beast he once was. The plethora of magic enemies hurts his low resistance and his speed cap is insufficient for some important tasks in the last few chapters. However, 4-E-1 is built on throwing a wall of generals at you, which he is more than sufficient for handling and his offense remains strong here due to high strength. 4-E-2 can be ended in a flash and the "boss" is a joke he can easily do well against (much like everyone else). 4-E-3 is full of super powerful but super slow dragons that he doubles and hits very hard, though like every physical unit he is threatened by the magic ones. And from this point on you can have an infinite durability brave axe on him, which is enough to clear the generic spirits in the last two chapters and at least put in some work against the auroras in the final battle. It's really only the final three bosses he falters against, and he's hardly the only one. On the whole his endgame performance isn't amazing, but it's still good, and certainly doesn't drag down his incredible contributions up to that point.

With great availability by Radiant Dawn standards, dominant combat for most of the game and incredible flight utility, Haar is one of the strongest units the series has to offer.

Up next: I feel like I've discussed a unit like this one already...

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Titania?
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Seth?
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It's pretty hard to describe one of those two without describing the other as well

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Robin could also fit.

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Marcus FE6

But actually probably Robin.

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Not even changing continents for this one smh

4. Titania (Path of Radiance)

I already did the whole speech about Jagens and the perception of them for the Marcus entry, so thankfully I don't need to do it here because there's no way anyone could ever look at Titania and not think she was ridiculous. She shows up in chapter 1 with base stats that blow away everyone else in your army in every stat with growth rates roughly on par or even a bit better than the rest. She starts the game with A rank axes which is already the highest rank that even matters since there's no obtainable S rank axe in this game, and has C in lances on top of it just for fun. Oh, paladins in this game have to choose which secondary weapon type to get upon promotion. Sure is convenient she happens to have the best two, isn't it?

It's honestly kind of hard to really go in depth on Titania here (not helped by Path of Radiance being one of the games I'm least familiar with). There's no big secret here, like Marcus' mid game performance being slept on, or some specific mechanic that she exploits uniquely, like Caeda's forged Win Spear. There's not much in the way of interestingly weighing her peaks against those of other units in her own game like with Rutger either, because while she does eventually stop being the best unit, it's late enough that there isn't enough time in the game for anyone to catch up to how many chapters she was the best for and no one can ever really match how good she was at her best (besides maybe Wrath/Resolve Ike, but that's only for two chapters and he's mediocre for the entire rest of the game). She's just...good. Like, really, really good.

Path of Radiance featuring combat canto is a nice special cherry on top for her, I guess. The freedom to continue moving after attacking has been a huge benefit for mounted units in every game it has appeared in and this one is no exception. While she's far from the only one who can use it (optimal play for this game pretty much boils down to deploying every horse and/or flying unit) she does spend most of the game as both your best unit for dispatching a tough enemy on player phase and your best unit for enemy phase exposure and/or rushing towards other objectives, making it extra good for her (even Marcus had to pick between these things).

In the latter half of the game Titania does finally slow down, as her strength and durability start to fall behind and even her speed eventually becomes a little bit lacking, but she remains a strong combat unit forever and you have enough deployment slots to bring her anyway. She's still dealing with things before foot units can get involved and there's not enough mounted units for her to run out of things to do. And of course she can always rescue drop people around if need be. Really the main thing that happens is she becomes a bit more reliant on forges to do damage than other units are, which is a downside sure, but hardly a serious one. You have tools like forging around for the specific purpose of using them, after all!

One special note is her performance on the Japanese exclusive Maniac Mode. I can't go into too much detail here due to having not played it myself, but from what I know, it essentially exaggerates her hard mode performance. She falls off more noticeably in the late game (though again, she's still great, just more of a hit and run unit than a front line enemy phase juggernaut a lot of the time), but her early game performance is even more valuable, maybe the most essential Jagen type unit in the entire series. Your other units feel like utter chumps early on in Maniac, but Titania just keeps on kicking ass like always. Ultimately it probably evens out to her being just as good as she is on hard mode, just a little different in exactly how valuable she is at any given point.

Up next: Into the top 3 with a unit that everyone seems to always guess regardless of what I say

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This time it's Robin for real, right?
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I'll go with Seth.

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No, it's actually Karla.

Well, it could be.

Robin's name can be anything you want it to be!

3. Robin (Awakening)

This write up will pretty much focus on Lunatic (though it essentially applies to hard as well, just remove any part that hints at anything resembling challenge), and mostly focus on female Robin since, from the perspective of trying to play effectively, she's clearly optimal.

Oh, what's this? A combat unit whose base stats are actually nothing special appearing on this list, much less this high? And she doesn't have particularly noteworthy growth rates? Or a busted personal weapon? Huh, that's weird. Meet Robin, the self-insert that starts out by representing what you really are (someone who wouldn't last long in a brutal medieval war) before turning in to what you wish you were (an invincible god of death, destroying all in your wake). Well, what I wish I was. Don't know about anyone else.

The key to understanding Robin is simple. It's not the asset/flaw system that lets you customize your stats a bit to focus on something you like (+Defense tends to be the easiest, though +Speed is probably the most optimal if you don't mind a bit less reliability early on). It's not the unlimited class access, though that is certainly a big deal. No, it's actually the tactician class level 1 skill, Veteran. Veteran grants you 1.5 times as much experience whenever someone is paired up with you. Sounds good, but not great, right? It's just a weaker and conditional version of the Paragon skill from earlier games, isn't it? Well...no. This is no small claim that I'm about to make, but I think it's probably the truth.

Veteran is the single most overpowered thing in the entire series.

The reason takes a bit of explaining. First of all, pair up is an incredibly powerful tool in its own right, offering substantial bonuses to your combat parameters that only increase with higher support levels in addition to the downright silly dual strike and dual guard mechanics, giving you a random chance of getting an extra attack from your buddy or an incoming attack negated entirely. You'll want your combat units carrying someone in their backpack at all times anyway, so being rewarded for it is great. Secondly, Awakening has the most generous experience points formula in the entire series, always giving you a minimum of 8 EXP per kill no matter the level difference. And that minimum is *before* Veteran is applied, meaning Robin gets 12 EXP at least for every kill. This may not sound like much, but with Awakenings high enemy density, leveling up off every 8-9 kills means you can level up multiple times per chapter if you have the combat to be exposed to that many enemies. And in a game with infinite reclassing and thus infinite leveling...

People often talk about how a strong unit can "snowball", getting ahead of the curve with a good level up or two and using that newfound strength to continue to level up faster now that they can kill more enemies more easily. Nothing in the entire series, not even Seliph with optimal inheritance, snowballs the way Robin does. In the prologue, even with a pair up she's struggling to even 1v1 a single enemy. By somewhere around chapter 5-8, she can be capable of facing every single enemy on the map consecutively without even a 1% chance of death (literally, Robin can reach the point where enemies flat out don't have enough attack power to kill her even if all their attacks connect). The first few chapters can be tough and require some planning to optimize your Robin exposure, complicated by the fact that her ideal pair up bot in these maps, Frederick, is also your only other respectable combat unit, but before long Robin turns into the most invincible juggernaut the series has ever seen, strong to the point that "move Robin forward, move everyone else out of range, end turn, mash skip" is perfectly viable.

As you head into the mid game Robin, being the overleveled monster she is, will get access to promoted level 15 skills earlier than anyone else. There's a lot of good ones (seriously, Robin can go with basically any class/build you imagine and be fine), but there's a very clear stand out. And no, I don't mean Sorceror. Nosferatu tanking on Lunatic is overrated by people who try to play like it's GBA FE and don't abuse pair up/Veteran. Who needs Nosferatu on a unit that doesn't die regardless? I'm talking, of course, about the Dark Flier class and its amazing (and fun) skill Galeforce. Essentially a self-dance that triggers once per player phase when you kill an enemy, it opens the door to all kinds of wonderful strategies, like walking up, killing a problem enemy and then just peacing out...or sprinting across the map to nuke a boss turn 1, making you wonder what all the fuss was about. It's not even hard to reach Galeforce before chapter 13, which tells you a lot about just how bonkers the level curve is in this game.

Of course, all of this requires you to be feeding a ton of kills to Robin, but...well, that's how Awakening is designed. People often talk of Fire Emblem games being easier if you focus on a few units, but that's not entirely true. It does tend to be better to have one great unit and some decent ones than a few good ones but no truly great one (so in something like Binding Blade, you ideally want to focus on Allen *or* Lance for leveling up and just have the other tag along enough to still be helpful when needed, since it gets you a game changer instead of just two solid but unspectacular guys), but that's not quite the same. In Awakening, with pair up buffing the stats of the lead unit so much and the generous experience formula and the way enemy stats scale up late game, it's ideal to funnel almost everything into Robin plus one, maaaayyybbe two other lead units at most. You can have a bunch of scrubs that will struggle hard once promoted enemies show up, or you can have a few utter game breakers. Lunatic gets a reputation for being unfairly difficult, but in reality...beyond the early game, most of it is actually kind of mindless. You just need to know the right approach to make it that way, which a lot of people don't because it's very counter-intuitive to how people usually play.

So...Robin has the most broken skill ever and becomes effectively invincible for much of the game. How the hell is this not the best unit ever? Well, the sketchy performance in the prologue and not entirely godlike performance of the next few maps is a downside. The other thing is, as busted as Robin is, she's actually not the only unit that can break Awakening. Veteran allows her to do it far easier and harder than anyone else, but really, most units can actually snowball hard if given the same kind of treatment. They might struggle a bit harder in the late game and never get the same kind of broken sk

Ah yes, Sethgurd
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Sounds like some kind of yogurt

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Might as well do one more before I get some sleep. Hmm, red haired paladin with stupid bases and great growths, didn't I do this already...?

2. Seth (Sacred Stones)

I'm not sure there has ever been a Fire Emblem character who felt more intentionally overpowered than Seth. Other names on this list feel like they may have been intended to suffer more from their weaknesses or not expected to be able to abuse the game mechanics as hard as they ended up being able to. Even Titania you could argue was designed to get you through the early game Maniac Mode hell and would fall off later. Seth, though? I can't imagine anyone ever even considering that this guy wasn't absurd.

Showing up in the prologue with amazing base stats that on their own are enough to carry him for a good half the game as your best unit and a ways beyond that as a pretty good one, Seth also brings fantastic growth rates to the table, arguably the best in the entire game for some reason. His HP, strength, defense and resistance growths are among the best, and even his speed is still an above average 45%. And when your weakest stat (besides luck, which he has enough of at base to avoid random crit chances anyway) is speed in a game with slow enemies that you double anyway...well, it makes you wonder what they were thinking. And as usual for these kinds of units, he's a paladin with great weapon ranks. No axes because paladins don't get those in this game, but he has A in swords and lances and can take his pick of which to S rank. All the usual paladin mobility advantages apply, of course. I'm almost surprised they didn't let him fly while they were at it.

Seth's effect on Sacred Stones is dramatic, to say the least. When people make tier lists for Fire Emblem games, it's common for titles like Shadow Dragon or Thracia to have separate lists made, one for "Warpskip" and one for not. With Sacred Stones, I've seen people use this same distinction for "normal" play as opposed to "Sethskip". He obliterates the early game with the greatest of ease to the point that even Franz, a cavalier with good bases and great growths who is by all normal standards a great unit, can legitimately struggle to gain experience without you slowing down for him. I don't know that even Marcus or Titania distort the balance of their games quite this hard.

And while I've argued that both Marcus and Titania remain strong for almost their entire games, I've noted that they do both fall down to Earth and fall behind their competition eventually. Seth...doesn't. Not really at least. Sure he stops ORKOing everything and starts being able to die without deliberate effort (or a run in with that chapter 6 fighter and his halberd, Magvel's greatest hero and the only man in the first 9 maps that can hope to make the god bleed...unless you just sit on the fort with a sword) but he never actually stops being the best, or at least tied for it. Even at equal levels his stats remain competitive with other units, and given how dominant he is to start and how he'll get all the early game boss kills, no one will ever be at an equal level with him, especially as many others need to promote early to keep up, sacrificing some extra levels they would need to match Seth's growth advantages. Oh sure there are maps here and there where he's not THE best because flight or warp is king, but in general he's still your most consistently good unit all the way to the very end.

I can maybe kind of see what they were going for with Seth. They figured if they gave him good growth rates, his average stats at max level would be roughly on par with other units and thus people wouldn't feel the need to drop him like they dropped so many other Jagens over the years, ensuring that if he was your favourite character you wouldn't feel screwed by him not being viable in the long term. But if that's the case...they overdid it. Big time. It's not just that Seth is ridiculously strong, it's the fact that he is good to the point that he doesn't even require you to pay attention for the first half of the game to keep him alive (barring that one fighter in chapter 6, may he rest in peace), and even after continues to just annihilate enemies with ease. If Sacred Stones was a harder game and he was "only" ORKOing some enemies while being highly durable, it would feel a lot less overkill than having him ORKO almost everything in existence while being functionally immortal. Units like Haar and Titania and Marcus kind of show this off - they're not *that* much worse than he is, really, but they all run into situations that make them feel mortal more often, whether it's failing to kill an enemy or facing an actual chance of death.

A final note on the difficulty of Sacred Stones. I've heard it argued that a unit being in a hard game makes them better than one in a good game, often used to claim FE6 Marcus is better than FE7 Marcus. I disagree with this argument pretty strongly. From the standpoint of difficulty mitigation, this would lead to things like, say, FE6 Klein being a better unit than Birthright Ryoma, because Birthright is too easy for Ryoma to make that big of a difference, while Binding Blade is harder and Klein reduces the difficulty of maps like 12 and 13 noticeably...even though Ryoma clearly stands out relative to the cast of Birthright waaaaaaayyyyy more than a solid but unspectacular unit like Klein does within his own game. I'm only bringing up the difficulty point to note how it just makes Seth "feel" even more absurd than he otherwise would. There's just a different sensation when your best unit can actually die or fails to kill things, even if in the context of their game they're just as good. Sacred Stones may be one of the easier games in the series, but that doesn't change the degree to which Seth stands tall above everyone else in it.

Up next: The best unit in the series, naturally! Doubt there's going to be much suspense on this one...

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http://i.imgur.com/T1HrmT0.png
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dear god

I don't even know what the fuck

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Titania is really pretty.

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My guess for what they were doing with Seth is that they wanted everyone to be viable for the ruins in the postgame, so they gave him great growths so you could use him in the ruins.

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Hbthebattle posted...

http://i.imgur.com/T1HrmT0.png

Waking up this morning has not brought any more clarity into what the fuck

Mewtwo59 posted...

My guess for what they were doing with Seth is that they wanted everyone to be viable for the ruins in the postgame, so they gave him great growths so you could use him in the ruins.

That could be the case. I've always wondered why they let you buy infinite stat boosters during the postgame, but only if you have the Member Card. Normally that would make everyone viable (well, broken, really) but the fact that they let you miss out on it potentially is kind of weird

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Seth really raises the question of why all the other prepromotes in FE8 are so mediocre.

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Kenri posted...

Seth really raises the question of why all the other prepromotes in FE8 are so mediocre.

Saleh and Duessel are both good.
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And here we are, the guy who is only not as obvious a choice as Seth because he's not as well known

1. Sigurd (Genealogy)

Who needs a Jagen when the lord can just break the game on their own?

Sigurd starts off already promoted for some reason, which, given Genealogy mechanics where promoting doesn't reset your level and the level cap is just 30 regardless, just means he gets to start out with better bases and a horse in the most Horse Emblem game in the series. Fair and balanced, naturally. He's basically the precursor to units like Seth and Titania, having the kind of dominant bases they do (albeit with a bit more competition in his case, since Quan exists) while also having great growths. Your other units need to team up to kill even the weakest prologue enemies, but Sigurd ORKOs those same enemies and can survive three hits and faces fairly low hit rates, helped in part by the leadership mechanic that gives him and anyone within three tiles of him +10 hit/avoid. Sigurd so good he motivates himself to be better.

Of course, Genealogy has some weird mechanics, like needing a skill called Pursuit to actually double anything. And naturally, Sigurd has it. This is a big thing that sets him apart from some of the other strong early units - Quan has stats that actually surpass his in some areas but needs the unreliable Adept to get a second hit on anything, and Lex can't attack twice, period, until he gets the brave axe, and that requires a big detour to get. It's not all that easy to ORKO stuff in first gen Genealogy, with most units relying on random skills to do it or your limited supply of brave weapons, but Sigurd, while he doesn't kill literally everything, certainly ORKOs more regularly than anyone else, especially if you give him some of the stronger weapons and items to help out.

Speaking of, Genealogy's unique inventory system ends up working out in his favour, to put it mildly. Each individual unit has their own gold and you can't trade items freely between people, instead needing to sell them and then have the other unit buy them. This allows the game to balance out the fact that some of its items are insanely strong. The brave sword is a steel sword with +2 might, +20 hit and no extra weight in addition to the brave effect, there's rings that give you +5 to a stat just for having them, others that give various skills, etc. Of course, what ends up happening is that a lot of these valuable items are carried by bosses. Guess who your best boss killer is? So Sigurd gets a ton of stuff dropped on his lap for free, allowing him to keep the things he wants and sell the ones he doesn't so he can afford anything else that he might like. And given that seizing castles is your objective on every map and he's the lord, and canto allows you to kill a boss and seize on the same turn, giving Sigurd all kinds of tools to play with isn't even favouritism, it's the optimal way to play. Your progress is determined by his progress.

If you've followed this topic and seen my write ups about Genealogy maps (or played the game yourself), you know how gigantic the maps are, and thus how valuable being mounted is. And Sigurd, of course, has a horse. In the game that introduced canto to the series, and even allows you to switch what weapon you have equipped after attacking, letting you prepare for enemy phase without hurting your player phase performance at all. You flat out need to be mounted to be anything above decent in this game, and luckily Sigurd has one. It kind of goes without saying, but at the same time it has to pointed out anyway because without that horse he'd probably be one of the most annoying lords in the series for being unable to actually get anywhere until the Leg Ring comes along late in chapter 3.

Sigurd also has a few other nice qualities to talk about. His weapon ranks are pretty much ideal, having A (technically S/* but that works a bit differently in this game) swords which are the best weapon type in Genealogy and B lances, allowing access to things like the brave lances. The lance rank often gets overlooked due to lances being very heavy in Genealogy, but Sigurd can get some genuine mileage out of the steel lance (his strongest weapon until chapter 3) and even the weak, heavy and inaccurate javelin. A special conversation in the prologue dumps a free silver sword into his inventory because he clearly needed the help, and in his final chapter he gets to spend some time with the legendary Tyrfing. He doesn't have it for a long time, but by design it pretty much trivializes an otherwise tough patch for him with its gigantic resistance boost, not to mention the raw power it provides. And the Miracle skills. And +10 skill and +3 AS just for kicks. Tyrfing's dumb. And until chapter 3 ends he can even abuse a special mechanic that lets you get a 20% chance to crit when attacking on player phase while adjacent to a sibling, giving him some extra oomph to cut through bosses if Ethlyn is nearby (and as your only mounted healer, she will be).

There are a couple of weaknesses people like to bring up with Sigurd, but in reality they don't exist. People will point to his "low" speed growth of 30%, but a closer look at Genealogy growth rates reveal that isn't even low, it's average (there are 6 characters with a higher speed growth, 7 with lower, and a bunch with the same). This isn't GBA or Awakening here, and as a sword user (the lightest weapon type besides wind magic) with Pursuit and an incredible base 12 speed, Sigurd in practice is quite fast and able to double almost everything. People sometimes also point out his "low" resistance, but almost every physical attacker has pretty similar or even lower res than his, and the exceptions mostly have problems with actually seeing combat. With his high HP and great mobility and offense, he's still better at dealing with magic than almost any of your other units (and he does get Tyrfing for a bit in chapter 5). Quite simply, his supposed weaknesses are just things that might look bad in a vacuum but are clearly not actual problems in context.

Running around with dominant offense and tremendous durability and the best mobility and a passive aura that buffs all teammates nearby, Sigurd has everything you could ask for in a unit and then some. There's almost no problem he isn't the optimal solution to, with the biggest reason for him to not deal with a particular situation being that it requires him to deviate from his goal of seizing castles rather than any sort of actual inadequacy. He can even manage effective 1-2 range with a javelin or one of the magic swords plus the magic range, something that is extremely rare for physical units in Genealogy. If you're frustrated with games like Binding Blade or Shadow Dragon where you have to babysit your fragile Lord all the way to the throne, this may be the

Once again, thanks for reading along, and once again, feel free to recommend ideas on what to write about next

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Now do strongest units canonically

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Thanks for writing them. It's really fun following these since you talk about the games in general as well, so I get to learn a lot more than the topic at hand.


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Yeah these are really good and interesting write ups.

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Cybat posted...

Now do strongest units canonically

1. Karla
2. Meg
3. Shanam
4. Samto
5. Rallyman

Phew, that was easy

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it's clearly Mist. train her in swords and you get a mounted staff unit with canto and alondite and immune to the medallion's curse.

i did this one playthrough for laughs

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I'm trying to think of potential ranking/write up topics to continue with, going to float some ideas

• Ranking the games. An obvious choice and a bit lacking in suspense when I've already made more or less obvious my favourite and least favourite (and a couple others are probably very obviously close to one end or the other), but hey, it's something to talk about.
• Top ten "bad" units. This is kind of a weird idea that's hard to explain, since it's not about actual bad units exclusively. My idea is just to talk about interesting units that seem "bad" in some way, whether they are or not. Units who look bad but are actually good, units who are bad in most ways but have some sort of special quality making them good, units who are legitimately bad but nonetheless have some cool unique traits, and units that are genuinely bad but have interesting qualities anyway are all in consideration. This is more about just finding things to talk about than a proper ranking since there isn't even anything concrete being measured.
• Top ten most powerful/difficult/frustrating bosses relative to when you fight them. Fairly simple
• Top ten favourite characters. Departure from the pure gameplay focus of the topic thus far and most of the other ideas here, but it might be fun...and it gives me reason to actually make this list because off the top of my head, I have a top three and then no clue <_<

Depending on what I go with it could take more or less time to get started (ranking the games could start fast since I have a pretty solid grasp on the order at the top and the bottom already, though it's easily the one that will take the longest to finish, while the character one in particular will require some thought), and of course if there's anything else that sounds interesting, feel free to suggest it because maybe I'll like the idea too

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I wouldn't propose this as a serious list and I don't even know if you've played around with idea enough to even have enough content for it but if you wanted a decent joke/filler list there's always Top "Weird Builds."

Like Sword/Alondite Mist I described above I've also done other silly things on a whim on some playthroughs. S-Rank Bow Lyn, Axe-centric Ike stuff like that. Heck you could go full joke and just theorycraft some funny ones that are permitted under the mechanics like Thunderbrand Lysithea.

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I've never really played around with meme builds much. Have some ideas for fun stuff but in practice I almost always end up just going with the tried and true approach to games beyond maybe trying out one below average or bad unit at a time. Some part of me just feels too wrong about leaving my best options unused to really commit to it.

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Top ten "bad" units sounds fun since I'll probably learn new and unexpected things about the units.

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I'm trying to put together a "bad" units list right now but I'm finding I don't have a ton of names to include unless I really stretch the definition, and it's already a pretty vague criteria as is. Not sure how great of an idea this really was

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Or just make it Top 10 underrated units?

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I've thought of going with that instead, actually. Might be interesting and there's certainly no lack of choices. Only problem is my perception of "underrated" might be a little skewed based on where I get most of my FE discussion from, but I suppose that's not too big of a problem. Just means some of the names on the list might be "underrated" by different standards than each other...hmm, yeah, I think this is what I'm going to go with.

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