Reasonable Investment or Favoritism in Fire Emblem?
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 30 มิ.ย. 2024
- Exploring the options between what I believe is a reasonable investment scenario for a unit vs the borderline concept of favoritism that sometimes gets thrown in with it!
Also a big shoutout to @pivotkid908 for helping me quickly obtain the Farina footage!! Please drop a sub there as well!
We'll be looking at Cyril (3 Houses), Anna (Engage), Mia (Radiant Dawn), Homer (Thracia 776) and Farina (Blazing Blade).
I also want to make very clear I'm not a hater on any of these units and this information is based on my analysis of averages and enemy thresholds.
The RD data was obtained here:
forums.serenesforest.net/topi...
The averages for engage were calculated here:
www.triangleattack.com/
Also utilized in this video were the following clips:
Spider-man laugh
• J. Jonah Jameson - cou...
A milky way
• This Is the End Movie ...
Do you agree with these takes? Do you disagree? Do you feel like there's a unit that also falls in either of this category? Let me know down in the comments below!
Timestamps:
00:00 - Intro
00:35 - Cyril (3 Houses)
02:32 - Anna (Engage)
04:48 - Homer (Thracia 776)
07:22 - Mia (Radiant Dawn)
15:31 - Farina (Blazing Blade)
18:47 - Outro - เกม
![แม่กลองสองใจ - ซีแกรม โตเกียว มิวสิค [ OFFICIAL MUSIC VIDEO ]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/GSQfVjcr_f4/mqdefault.jpg)
idk giving nephenee all of the stat boosters, bonus xp, resetting for perfect bexp levels, and forges seem pretty reasonable to me
LMAO LITERALLY ME
Bitch was level 20 by part 3 while some high tier characters were starving for xp and I'm not apologetic about it
This is exactly how I play path of radiance every time, I have a perfect save at level 10 (her recruit prison break) that I use every time I want to replay it. Except the resetting for perfect levels lol, I just reset if she fail levels.
My favoritism for Mia in PoR becomes a reasonable investment in RD. Checkmate.
Can’t argue with that!!! You have me beat ahahahha
I am a Farina defender and I agree fully. People act like 20k is a lot, but it is managable. I've even gotten her without selling the Ocean seal.
I don't know if I can truly say 20k gold isn't a lot but this is also a game where people claim money doesn't matter so we'll run with that for now...
@@cartooncritic7045
I've never been hurting for money in FE 7 because I chose to recruit Farina.
@@cartooncritic7045 to be fair, when you know what you're doing in FE7, it's really not. The game gives you far more promotion items than you'll ever really need (especially true on hard modes where deployment is far more limited) and I can think of several stat boosters that are better off sold than used on a unit, such as skill books and goddess icons. There's also plenty of opportunities to nab small bits of extra gold by stealing things like enemy thief lockpicks and selling them. There's also like, 3 different arena chapters before reaching Farina as well, which can be a decent way to accrue some extra funds, even WITHOUT abusing it and still clearing the chapter within a reasonable amount of turns.
I've never had an especially hard time buying Farina, AND I like training Dart. It can get a little tight for some weapons in the mid-game, sure, but FE7 is generally pretty generous with handing out freebies and steals. As long as you pay attention to available weapons and use what you get, buying Farina shouldn't be anything more than a solid investment.
Not the mia hate nooooo 😭
I mean idk about hate but like. She's kind of really really mid in path of radiance and needs like nephenee level babying and bonus exp to get them to a pretty decent usable state. That isn't to say she's bad or anything though.
She's really good in radiant dawn, nephenee too.
@@kain1799 I remember a video by I think Queenly Arts. Basically from what I remember they said most units are good it’s just the way people view discussion around these units is bad. Like let’s say Mia is good and will make the game easier, Ike is better and will make the game even easier, while Titania is the best and will make the game the easiest. Titania or Ike being better than Mia does not make Mia bad, it just means in terms of being good they are relatively better. There’s also always different metrics people use to evaluate a character. Nino is great for a ranked run, but pretty bad if you’re trying to do an ltc. She’s still a good unit that can aid your army if some of your magic users died or you need an extra staff unit before Renault and Athos. Using most units throughout the series will not actively make the game harder just take different amount of time to finish the game if you use said characters.
Love the video! You give viable and great reasons on why they are either invested on or favoritism. Keep up the amazing work
Great video! I thank you for shedding light on mighty Homer and Thracia too!
Whenever I play PoR or Radiant Dawn I always use Mia for favoritism knowing entirely how she works in the game
Investment works on Mia better if she has data transfer but considering how bad is using a no horse Sword locked unit most people wouldn’t consider using her which I understand, I would recommend even using Zihark or Stefan better, and even so, It’s probably that Mia will only cap speed or skill, str if you’re lucky
In Radiant Dawn, I recommend using Zihark as the best option for Trueblade because of availability, earth support and if he has transfers, he’s pretty damn good with his killing edge and giving him the brave sword makes him even better, pair him with Nolan or Volug and he’s dodging almost everything, even more than Mia
On a sidenote, I also have a favouritism for Edward, knowing that people consider him a bad unit and average as a Trueblade, but just like Mia, if you invest on him he can turn out pretty well but of course the games throws you a Swordmaster with the best affinity and Adept so why would you even consider investing on edward outside of Easy or Normal mode? (I do)
Tl;dr
Mia is solid, Investment can work on her and I personally had a good experience using her but obviously my experience doesn’t speaks for everyone so It’s just there, but anyway I agree on your thoughts of Mia
Funnily enough I was considering this when evaluating units in some CMUs. I think you summed it up best when concluding how Mia needed a lot of babying to get her into a semi-decent state.
I would rephrase it this way: "In this game where my resources are limited and my map objectives are tight, how much can I afford to "adjust" my strategies to ensure that you can do the job expected of your build? And can you do more if I am forced to use you outside of that scope for ironman reasons?" The more investment I need, the lower I rank the unit if they can only perform as expected.
Farina is a great example here where I can say resources needed are relatively minimal, with the steepest being 20k gold. It ain't that bad if you are clear in what you need to buy, and most people would grab the needed items to cough up that money.
Sure, you could use that money to buy other items, but if you got good units, typically even iron to steel weapons and basic 1-2 rangers are good enough to clean up enemy mobs.
Reasonable investment? I'd honestly say Jill and Marcia in POR. Both of which having serious difficulty being underleveled and having difficulty killing things due to being ludicrously inaccurate/weak respectively. However both make use of bonus exp and forged weapons better than basically everyone else.
Anna in Engage is fine in my opinion, but there's one thing Anna can do but nobody else can do, which is farming money.
Yeah you can argue other units can do the same damage output or getting better performance than Anna with minimum investment, but if you do invest in Anna, she will bring money for you once every several kills, which allows you more resource to use in this part. I'm sure everyone can agree money is a sparce resource in Engage, also if you manage it well you shouldn't be too short in money, but I think if someone invest in Anna for the sake of getting 2~3K more money for each map (Not to mention you can farm infinite money in Celica Paralogue), I don't think that really counts as favoritism. It's simply an investment choice.
The problem with using Anna to get money is that you have to spend tons in the early game on a Second and Master seal to make her viable, and with how much time it takes for her luck to grow + her to get a bunch of kills she doesn’t end up paying off that investment until the late game, at which point a little bit of extra cash isn’t as impactful as it would have been in the early game… where you would have had more if you didn’t spend any on Anna. Her gold obtaining abilities are only really helpful if you’re grinding
I do not agree that money is sparse in Engage. I usually beat the game on Maddening while still having 80000+ without using her since they dump so much money onto you.
How much money will Anna be making for you with her base 3 Luck? Even on Fixed Mode it will still take a while for her Luck to be high enough for Make a Killing to consistently give you money for the kills she gets. She'd need basically every Goddess Icon in the game and *several* levels in the High Priest class for her to reach that point, too.
I was going to agree with you about Anna until you compared her to clanne. Clanne is just as high investment as Anna, being that you need to give him a chapter or two of miccy exp and also he quite likes one of the spirit dusts. Anna will do far far better in the long term with these, and long term is important in engage as without dlc chapters the early game is pretty easy and the late game is very hard so long term investment units are very good. Her money generation is also a bonus once she hits 20+ish luck at the point of the game engage stops handing you out big chunks of money. I by no means think anna is a super good unit but shes certainly leagues better than clanne. Also comparing her to pandreo is unfair as he's the premier magic unit that none of the middle of the bunch magic units can measure up to (Same thing as you comparing lapis to kagetsu)
Clanne is leagues better than Anna. He has all of chapter 4, 5, 6, p1 and p2 to get exp if you want to use him as your carry. All those chapters are easy and have weak enemies, except ch5, so it's the perfect opportunity to get exp on a 1-2 range unit, promote them and give them a Dawn engraved tome to steamroll the rest of the game. Céline does it better but I've used Clanne for this role and the game is definitely not ready for a mage knight with 18 speed in chapter 7
Meanwhile, Anna joins in that same ch7 underleveled, with absolutely terrible bases that she needs at least 30 levels to grow out of, and even when she does she's still slower than Boucheron at equzl level. She's very clearly a joke unit and the game treats her as such
@@oscarcapac1786 ???? you feed all the early exp to clanne and not units like alear or chloe? he has a 10% personal magic growth btw compared to annas 50% so I'm not sure what you're talking about with her needing 30 levels and he apparently doesn't. You're also wrong on the boucheron speed thing, she has a personal speed of 50% and a base of 7, he has a personal speed of 45% and a base of 7.
@@Speedwinghere sage anna gets 0% class growth in speed and it's her most common class. Boucheron will always be faster than her, whether in warrior or wyvern
I usually give early game exp to Céline as she's by far the best unit you get, dodge tank Céline with Byleth breaks the game so hard she makes Engage maddening look like Sacred Stones easy. But I did the same carry build with mage knight Clanne and he's also great. Far better than Alear or Chloé, both fall off a cliff in the midgame
@@oscarcapac1786 sage anna is a trap, she's a lot better in mage knight. Which is how you would compare her to clanne anyway by putting them in the same class.
Did the numbers a 10/20 anna and clanne in mageknight, Anna has 8 more magic, giving her 16 more damage than him when they double, which she will because she only has 3 less speed than him
The question with favoritism and investment is - Is favoritism really a bad form of investment? Of course from a meta standpoint there will always be units that need minimum ammount of ressources to become good. But from a simpler PoV we do not need to grind out the best of the best. With Anna you could argue that, while she needs at least one master and one second seal, you could also argue that due to the fact that we have prepromotes later on that will be better than almost every unit thats not promoted at that point (Extreme cases being Kagetsu vs Lapis and Diamant for example, later on Goldmary, etc.) you rather sink 1 extra master seal for a unit that you train and will become a good trainee unit instead of "wasting" it on a unit that is getting replaced either way. Or you simple don't use Anna and the majority of the early game squad once they become outclassed. Fact is many base class units in Engage are shaky in terms of growth unless or even if promoted so using the most likely growing units can be an arguement here. And while Pandreo does exist its still good to have multiple units for similar roles imo. I also don't think you need to give Micaiahs Levels to Anna. It just makes things easier. And it can be invested into any Pre-Chapter 10 unit to help it getting over the benchmarks set by prepromotes bases. Which essentially makes investment into any unit that does not have a superior quality such as Yunakas infinite avoid for example into a case of favoritism. Though to me thats actually a good thing for games like FE. My point is, there isn't really a definitive awnser to what investment is really good or bad as long as it'll reach the goal. Since, even if one unit you invest into might take much more ressources, another unit that needs almost nothing can be recruited afterwards in the game to balance things out. You do not need to bump every single ressource into a single unit rather than distributing it on a bigger ammount (it felt as if this was often the case when watching the video). Depending on the game, there will be units that can become powerful enough to carry the entire army, but those units will require some more indepth knowledge of either the series or the single game itself (especially if we look at games like SoV, Fates, Three Houses and Engage due to the complexity of modern FE Games or Thracia, Holy War and Radiant Dawn due to them being vastly different from the other games). Favoritism is often used as a way to frame/downtalk on strategies that work but aren't the known most efficient/highest value results. There can be a discussion about the ammount of ressources nessecary to make comparisons between units. But then there is always the question if these comparisons are only valid if it is about a highly popular Unit thats not/far from the best option or really for everyone. Because then you could apply the favoritism examples to every other unit that is just average as well. And over all we also do not take into account players perspectives who get into these games blind or replay "without doing their homework." Ultimately it comes down to each players perspective of what is and what isn't worth it. And the territory of working out the definite best strategies over what you manage to get to work becomes mostly relevant to create guides for those who cannot beat the highest difficulties. I hope what I said can be understood since it is relatively late when I'm typing this. Your video is a great addition to the current discussions though I might add that its a bit unlucky to not take into account critboosts for Mia when the PCC of Homer is one of his biggest strengths for example. Those who know about Thracias Mechanics will know that PCC is more reliable, those who don't might feel confused. I also think Farina is great even without the extra investment beyond Javelins and her entry fee.
Totally agree that playstyle and knowledge prior to playing will play HUGE factors into utilizing a unit well. But I do think, even with that, there is a lot to be said about specific units performances.
I will say I don't believe the comparison of Mia to the PCC of homer is even in the same league for contention. For starters, Homer's PCC is innate, he needs nothing for it to exist.
But with Mia, now we're talking about yet ANOTHER forge on top of the MT forge and the crit forges are really really expensive as opposed to the regular MT. Yeah, it does increase her thresholds for one rounding.. but I think i've pointed many different examples of units that can 1 round without needing any of that and how those resources in terms of gold/exp/forges/statboosters can be put towards more reliable options then just sinking them into Mia. At the end of the day, even with the forges, this still doesn't help her performance on her first 2 chapters, nor does it increase her bulk for consistent enemy phasing, or solve her 1-2 range problem. All of which homer has solved with a promotion and nosferatu instant access.
Also i really appreciate this type of comment! Constructive challenging and criticism is great for the discourse so thank you for it!.
8:08 "I don't like gambling on crits and I don't think anyone should"
That's where you lost me and how I lost my house
Anna is like the embodiment of Engage, no I will not elaborate on that.
Good video with that said, this is always a fun topic to think about that its interesting how some people accidentally let their favoritism show when talking about using a character without meaning too.
On a side note of Dart vs Farina, you forgot the third option, using both of them because they support eachother and just not playing a ranking run that session lol.
In the Ike and Mia segment you forgot that Ike can also get 25 speed if he gets a speed transfer in PoR. Not sure if Transfers qualify for this discussion but it could be thought of, as a similar situation to Lyn Mode units in FE7.
I didn't bring it up but you are correct. He'd snowball even harder then!
wyvern lord cyril with point-blank volley goes wild
I'll go ahead and say that Mozu is more of a favoritism unit and less of a reasonable investment... now to wait for the horde...
Isn't this widely agreed upon though? Especially in the case of birthright mozu 😔
I'll say birthright/revelation mozu is, but there's an actual argument for Conquest Mozu due to the access to Kinshi knight that few units can actually get to without a pairing and that she just has at base!
Kinshi knight/Archer mozu is actually quite solid, and one of the best maps for her is hinoka's battle. Using her also gives you an excuse to support and pass the Archer class to someone else
In BR/Rev I think everyone would agree. But in CQ's environment the archer class line just performs so well, and the game is actually remarkably lenient toward the amount you need to train her through the early game. Base level 1 Mozu with a Bronze Bow +2 on Lunatic mode still OHKOs the pegasus knights on chapter 10, which is the primary thing she'll be doing on that map anyways, easily the biggest difficulty spike in the game's first half. Being a 2-range attacker makes it easy to attack safely with her and attack stance with people, and CQ is very good at giving 1-tile walls for her to shoot over. That's a big contrast with other trainee-style units who are usually 1-range locked and almost all have accuracy issues as well, on top of arriving later than her and being able to accomplish far less.
High tier? No, and I don't think anyone would argue that. An unreasonable investment? Not that either.
And the Heart Seal she requires also isn't nearly as big of an investment as her detractors often claim. Without doing outright bad meme builds, there are just 4 units who are competing for the first 2 earlygame heart seals: Jakob, Corrin, Elise, and Mozu. Horse!Jakob is very nice and comforting for people craving a conventional Jagen, but really isn't necessary as you get better at the game - and nobody wants to early promote Felicia. Corrin might want to jump into their side class, but rarely does that need to be done so early in the game, and even just staying in Prince/ss they will be your best unit (bar arguably Camilla) in ch10. Wyvern!Elise is great but not a lot of people are a fan, or comfortable with taking her down that route.
So as surprising as it is, I'd say Mozu is the one who most strongly wants one of the two early heart seals, and benefits the most from one. Does that mean you have to use her? No. Does that imply you can't just save the heart seals for later? Also no, though your access to heart seals skyrockets after this point beginning with the lvl 2 Shop giving you 3 more, such that it's hardly a competed-over resource past this point.
@@LoudWaffle I agree that it's a big contrast to other trainees in other games, but that's not relevant in Conquest since she's the only trainee there. She has more potential than the others besides Cyril, that's for sure, but I still think she doesn't quite hit the usefulness benchmark to reach that high.
She is definetely a great help for chapter 10, but I'd argue she's worth less of the spot than Nyx, who can contribute to cleaning house on the top-left side with her fire orb, allowing Silas and/or Selena to kill the oni savages more consistently before the tide lowers and they swarm (if you don't rush takumi, which I advocate for) or even Odin, who I believe contributes more with nosferatu tanking the top-right side or bottom-right.
Even more, the heart seal argument is the nail in the coffin for why I don't think Mozu is a reasonable investment. You say that Horse Jakob is good but not needed... the very same thing applies to Mozu. You don't need Archer Mozu lol. The Heart seal on Jakob is even more relevant due to his unique quirk of getting promoted skills while still being internally unpromoted, meaning he gets Shelter, Elbow Room and Defender very quickly (Defender helps him get the treshold to double pegasus knights a lot easier). And Corrin absolutely wants to earlygame reclass out of nohrian prince(ss) because that class is just mediocre and wields no worthwhile skills, not to mention branch of fates in conquest rewards you for feeding a lot of your kills to corrin the most, as Rinkah is not usable and Kaze autolevels to a reasonable state, so it's often branch of fate corrin will get lvl 9 or lvl 10 in chapter 6, just in time to reclass Corrin to another talent like wyvern, fighter, merc or even Archer himself instead of Mozu.
Mozu's chapter is great for training her, but it's also great for training your other units instead for more support gains, as you often are incentivized to rush a pairing, and training wyvern elise's weapon rank is crucial to get her going + all the chip exp she recieves, don't underestimate bolt axe elise! Other better-than-mozu imo units are Niles, Odin, Arthur, Effie and Silas, who appreciate the exp a lot and it specially helps silas build his lance rank if you haven't got D in during ch8.
I agree the value of Kinshi Knight for other units is huge, but she doesn't need to be invested to give that reward to child unit/her husband, with the cost of a deployment slot for 5 chapters, you can give Kinshi Knight/Sniper to 2 other characters without investing resources onto mozu, in special using the very valuable heart seal + the kill exp needed to get her rolling, or the forged weapons which Niles would appreciate even more. Other great ways to get a kinshi army going is with Azura who gives kinshi access to her husband, A+ (relevant to Elise, for example), and father's child, not to mention Corrin with a pegasus/archer talent will also give kinshi to partner + children. (There's also the secret Laslow!Selena combo who gives Kinshi Knight/Falcon Knight to Laslow). So you already have plenty of options to make kinshi knights out of without having to invest your resources to Mozu.
And to finish my thoughts, I still think Mozu is a fun unit, and she can carry your endgame and kill takumi. But most units can do that too, see the soloing endgame videos on youtube, so I believe she falls more on the favoritism spectrum than a Reasonable Investment (maybe Axomm and I could discuss this more in-depth xd)
Nooo not the looking at Mia objectively part! I am literally crying and sobbing right now. I think those units need more than a milky way , they need a snickers.
Oooh snickers, now that’s some good candy!
This is mostly going to be about Mia, as the largest chunk of the video was about her, and I may be jumping around places, and I also never played Radiant Dawn on the absolute hardest mode so I can’t speak too much for thresholds or dependability.
-comparing her to Zihark regarding bexp usage is a bit unfair. Yes all things equal, Zihark can exploit that system better because he caps earlier, but as we know units having a paper advantage over another unit doesn’t mean much in Radiant Dawn’s context. If Astrid had the same availability and join context as Boyd then I’d say Paragon and a mount would already make her better than Boyd, who never doubles without a speed transfer + speed wing. I and a lot of other people would probably say that Boyd is still better than Astrid because in context of which maps she’s available on and what you want to do for those, she sucks, while he can at least hit things hard and slow armor knights with the hammer from the Dawn Brigade (lord knows the tigers and cats aren’t scared of the hammer). I simply don’t think there’s enough exp that Zihark can get on maps in part 3 to make that strategy worth it. That might sound redundant when talking about bexping a unit up, but you generally want them to get their likely caps naturally in battle with the added benefit that you may get other stats, then once at those caps raise level with bexp, in which case Mia can actually afford to get those few level ups early on. Generally I think Greil Mercs has more resources to get Mia to and past True Blade and still be effective in combat across the board than Dawn Brigade has to do the same for Zihark.
-You spend a lot of time arguing against energy drop Mia, and I think you make a valid argument for Ike or Titania or even Haar to get it if you want any of them to cap that stat to start enhancing their speed stat. In general you showed Mia is not really the optimal place for your best resources to go, but what about your other resources? Mia starts 4 points from her skill cap and 2 from her speed cap, usually you cap one then get some decent benefit from bexp and then you do the other to get consistent and solid benefit from it. If you want to do that naturally, you’d have to wait for her to get 4 skill; her 60% growth means that’s going to happen, but that’s on average 7 levels, and when lucky 4 at minimum, which means at best you can do this strategy optimally at level 11 and on average you have to wait till level 14 or after, still time to profit but it’s much more expensive bexp wise at this point. Before this point, you can get two secret books, and even if you argue that the gold in Dawn Brigade is more important so you skip buying that one, the one in 2-2 is practically uncontested, and where other characters use that to enhance a decent stat, Mia can use it to enhance more practical stats like strength and defense, making it objectively stronger in her hands. Suddenly Mia is only 2 points away from her cap, on average getting capped in skill and speed in 4 levels, usually a great chance of doing it in 3, and if really lucky consecutively 2 level ups, which means you have a level 9 unit with two stats capped, which actually justifies the bexp easier as she’ll get more out of it sooner and for less cost in total bexp spent, as well that bexp boosting at level 11 sword master is more feasible than doing the same for a level 13 true blade Zihark.
-I’d also argue that her high skill and speed makes her the perfect user of Soren’s adept. While yes we talked about crits and to an extent skill based procs not being reliable in the video, I’d like to highlight a few things. First off, her personal vantage can be greatly assisted by Adept, as if she kills an enemy in two hits she has a higher chance to kill without being hurt first. Her high skill and speed means she also has the highest chance as well as the most rolls on Adept. Even if you think that this doesn’t really help her or is too unreliable to credit her for, what did it cost? Soren’s a terrible user for it, we’ve established that Ike and Titania generally kill what they need to already, the only real loss condition I’m seeing is you can equip Ike with Adept to give him a chance of one rounding the sword masters he doesn’t double, but for every hit he tanks fine and kills well in response to without a proc means you’re effectively wasting a pretty good early game resource.
-As soon as you get Ragnell, Ike pretty much never uses any other sword. Hell, he might just use Axes to Hammer black Knight, hand axe, or train to use Urvan at the end of you really want him to. This just leaves a Vacuum of untapped resources, including the storm sword and future wyrmslayers for tower activities, and at level 10 and beyond True Blade I feel like any non-skill differences between your sword masters are negligible, at least Mia is the easiest to get that far outside of Stefan spawning in ready to go, with the drawback that he doesn’t contribute for a very long time.
I think Mia can overall justify the attention and praise she gets in RD. An armor slayer in Part 3 (or at ALL in RD, when she spawns 3 feet from one in PoR) is all I say she’d need to start taking names and contributing a lot earlier.
Ok so two things I think you overlooked but I love the ideas your having:
If adept is good on Mia, imagine how good it is on Shinon.
Second: even if you BEXP cap Mia, the damage threshold we spoke about with all that investment will STILL be 1 more than base Ike. So early skill book/speed wing / all that, doesn’t change the fact that it’s her strength cap that’s bad. Now totally fixable, but very very expensive with forge cost.
I honestly don’t believe Mia is bad. But she’s nowhere near the powerhouse people make her seem with some actual heavy resources poured into her.
Even in your comment, we’re now doing everything I said PLUS adding adept, plus adding some stuff front the other squads and the whole point is exactly that.. we’re just trying to justify using her by moving the goalpost of what’s acceptable to use her.
On the Zihark thing i can concede, albeit he does have access to a master crown there to help with early promotion. I’m not consider it though, because then I’d be favoring him over someone like Jill (who o think he uses it better anyways, but I’d be hypocrite to count that in his favor). So I’ll say there is definitely merit to the argument that he might not be able to maximize the BEXP naturally. ESPECIALLY on HM were exp is much much more limited (which is also why I don’t recommend dumping it into Mia either)
@@fireembros1165like I said, I never played on the hardest difficulty so I don’t have the best feel of how things are in reality in that game, I can’t talk the best on PoR maniac mode despite playing that game a lot either so I leave that to those who have. If she just doesn’t have the stats to get the job done then she doesn’t, and those characters more easily enabled should get those resources (I never said Mia should get the Part 2 Speed wing for example, there’s no argument as to who needs and gets that).
It’s like someone who hasn’t played HHM defending Rebecca by saying all the early fliers can get one-shot by Rebecca. In reality she’s 5 strength off of one tapping them and isn’t even doubling Steel Lance Pegasus knights which… I guess lets you set up kills and get more total exp. Having said that, if someone is defending a unit in a debate for not killing enemies they have effective damage on, I think the plot has been lost somewhere lol.
When you were starting on who to invest in at the end of thr video, i was thinking it would be the standard Jill or Marcia or Florina, interesting Farina
I like this conversation, as always use your favorites but recognize when your fav is asking for 70% of your resources that should be spread out across your units.
As an example, I love Micaiah to pieces but I can acknowledge she’s still a staff bot at best. Just because I give her a forged light tome with a lot of crit and feed her stat boosts and bexp doesn’t make her any better
I have another video on micaiah that actually kinda explains she's a little better than that due to just being able to 1 round generals and cavs at a part of the game that NOBODY can do that barring Tauroneo basically, but yes.. I do agree you need to "activate" her potential and it's not intuitive at all!
Totally use your favorites 100%! But keep it real I always say ahahahahha!
I've always found Farina super underrated. She's a flying combat god (something Florina won't be unless lucky), far easier to train than Heath, and actually has really good bulk for a pegasus knight. But I also really like her so I'm a bit biased lol
Yeah the fact she has actual res does assist a lot in training her. Fe7 weirdly enough does have quite a few magical enemies (even if they are weak) that can dogpile on a unit with poor res. But if a unit has salvageable res, they pass by!
I can't say much because whenever I play fe7 I always use florina xD. Surely not the best flier but she's my favorite
Florina with all of the extra levels and stat boosters from Lyn Mode absolutely will be the best flier in that game.
Farina is pretty easy to train anyway, though. People definitely overstate how much you actually need to get her online at anything slower than LTC pace.
As an added bonus, Farina can perform a Tri Attack with her sisters.
For a game built on statistics and math you wouldn't think people would have such a hard time understanding what worthwhile investment is. If the unit gets good statistics and skills they're a good unit.
What usually makes mia usable is that she comes with vantage and you pair it with wrath for silly shenanigans. You can do it with nephenee too but you can also just have 2 of them.
Honestly this is a great video, tho I will say the milky way joke got a little tiring, but besides that yea I'd say you made a great point
I mostly agree about Mia, but comparing anyone to Shinon, Haar or Ike who isnt also one of those 3 is actually hydrogen bomb vs coughing baby. Those 3 are in fact in a league of thier own.
Most reasonable investment I have is Etie. Only early game unit that has any semblance of usable strength, abuses bow forges and is only outclassed in physical damage by freakin Panette. The downside? Some SP for Canter, maybe early marth ring usage, a second seal to Warrior and all the early game exp you werent gonna give to the rest of Firene or most if Brodia since they dont scale into anything once solm hits
The Clanne and Anna example doesn't work because Clanne isn't honna be level 5 when you get to Anna. Anna's only additional cost is the Second Seal. The 5 levels can be obtained in 1 chapter, and you're going to do it to a unit anyway.
So why can’t I do it to Celine or to Framme?
@@fireembros1165 I wS speaking specifically on him bringing up Clanne. Both are pretty good options. Celine is pretty clutch early game, so she's pretty likely to be leveled.
I would argue citrene is a favoritism unit
Citrine is a pretty bad mage imo
I always go for the second thing. Why use an unit i dont like?
Sir i WILL use Arden and NO amount of "he's a bad unit" will stop me, my man killed Eldigan, Langbalt and Reptor with perseverance and a little bit of divine luck. Favoritism is my copium that i inhale all time!
I like mia mainly because I am a sucker for trueblades. Although she does not hold a candle to my favourite character in the game, Zihark, its just fun to use trueblades. They have insane dodge, and being a female, mia has a higher luck cap so is a better natural dodgetank without a support. Give her resolve and daunt and she becomes a blast to use. I genuinely believe Trueblade i is the most powerful class in the game especially in hard mode when given skills. The problem is without resolve they are not able to mow down hordes of enemies and she cant have adept and resolve at the same time like Zihark can, and also lacks his earth affinity.
I don't hate on Mia, I really don't. I think she's totally serviceable and the trueblade class is super powerful like you said. I was just trying to point out she's not out here pawning the game without heavy resources, but she totally is capable and can be activated easily!
For clarifying, by most powerful I do not mean the best, I still believe that fliers offer more utility, but in pure combat, the trueblade with resolve is unmatched. Even units like laguz royals you can not toss carelessly against a horde of dragons in the tower, but I can confidently put a trueblade there in hard mode and its amazing watching them fight with 70 crit with alondite, 60% adept and vantage proc rate (70 with high biorythm) and 0 chance to be hit.
@@fireembros1165 Oh I agree, the reason I love using trueblades like mia is that the only resource I would say is needed is resolve and you can remove that any time. Dodgetanking works even if she hits like wet paper. Plus I am aware of my trueblade bias, watching all the skills and crits proc and 1shot dragons just scratches that itch, and one thing I found out, it is actually possible to dodge a hit while asleep, as sleep does not automatically make enemies hit but just reduces avoid by 100. Normally this means the same thing but I once saw zihark dodge a hit in the black knight tower chapter and I found that insanely hilarious.
I'm a big Anna fan in Engage and I'm not sugarcoating any flaws she has.
She has a very bad starts, that is easily remedied by Micaiah, but I can see that this is purely self improvement and Micaiah exp taken away from other units.
Because of her high growth in spd and magic, there is a payoff of a good magic unit at the end of the tunnel, but even then she would be the 3rd or 4th best Magic unit for the mid-lategame behind Ivy and Pandreo and probably Citrinne.
I see Clanne, Jean, Anna and Framme as training project that really need the help of like Micaiah to get to lvl 10 promo at any reasonable pace and I just pick Anna among those and still have a painless journey through Engage Maddening
Out of those 4 though Jean will end up better than her overall so I would personally choose him first.
I used to always hoard the stat boosters in sacred stones for Amelia because i thought it was funny to slap her on a horse and send her into battle, but that was knowing it was a waste of resources i couldve given to so many others
NO shame at all in beefing up our favorites!
I thought the meta build for Anna is warrior with a shining bow which is just levels and a master seal
As someone who likes using Mia i find those other peoples idea pretty bad. When i use her she gets basically no BEXP and doesnt get the energy drop (i just give that to Jill) and still find her easy to use. Yes her damage starts low but there are plenty of times that a unit will jusy miss a kill and she can easily get it since Ike or someone else is better off attacking a full health enemy so she naturally levels that way. Plus i find she is the best support for ike since I feel Soren and Oscar arent good long term plus if you use Oscar he will outpace Ike and want to ne somewhere else, however Mia can help both of them be unhittable and can do pretty stromg damage later on.
I’ve really only beaten a few of Fire Emblem’s games on hard mode difficulty (Awakening ,Echoes and Fates Revaluation) and I refuse to touch Lunatic/Maddening for my own mental health so I never had to worry about picking the meta unit over a favourite, I still like to try different characters each time I play but my favouritism always ends up sneaking in every time.😅
I just finished my second play through of Engage and tried using Anna but I also used Clanne needless to say Anna didn’t work out well and Clanne bulldozed everything in his path I wasted a lot of resources on Anna so I wasn’t happy.
First time I played hector mode and saw Farina I was like oh cool another Pegasus knight then saw the price and nearly fainted 20,000 gold for me was pretty much impossible to get and both Florina and Fiora were already doing her job so yeah there was literally no point.
Great video though favouritism vs meta is always an interesting subject.
Would it be fair to say a unit is only entitled to a stat booster if they get something semi-unique out of it?
For example:
A unit who would one round a large group of enemies, but they're just barely too slow, so you give them the speedwing.
A unit who can instantly use a valuable staff on promotion, needs a couple of levels to promote getting a bit of bonus EXP.
A unit with great growths who, on average, would equal or rival your other units with just a few levels, getting your silver lance so they can contribute.
I think all of these are applicable situation barring maybe the last one, and even then it depends on the scenario.
I don’t take much issue with actually investing a resource into a unit for a return. What bothers me more honestly, is when people attempt to say “X unit IS THE BEST user of this resource” which is very evident with Micaiah and Anna from Engage when there are a plethora of other options who just outright perform better/take less to fix then them.
Of course every unit requires investment, but how much vs how quickly the return is seen is what I as a player value most.
Was anyone really arguing that Mia was better than Ike or Titania? Mia IS good in radiant dawn, but Ike and Titania are both top 5 units. Shinon is also notoriously a monster, his problem being his lack of 1-2 range until t3.
How about because this is a single player game, I play the character(s) I want. If that means I have to be better at playing the game, then I'll get better at playing the game. At least I don't have to deal with Rank 1s and Boosters in WoW.
I think mage knight prevents luck gains right? Her as mage knight gained laughable lucks where she proc’d gold only 3 or 4 times
I remember playing through PoR the first time and Mia died super easy. I'm a bit of a completionist so i restarted, recruited and then dropped her in the stash
i think Anna is a reasonable investment because she doesn't have a lot of competition for the ressources she needs to become good
I want to point out that I do agree Anna has some good uses towards mid to endgame in term of combat, but there are plenty of units that compete with her. Celine is there, Citrinne, clanne (if you feel like using him), framme, even Vander can take up a deployment spot mean for her to make the earlier chapters easier.
Out of all of those I do feel Celine is the most
Obvious choice however. Great combat early game, then mid game transitions into a support roll through her personal class with access to staves and good thoron chip damage. Sure, she doesn’t have the same combat as Anna, but this is if you give Anna speed boosts and Micaiah and all those things. Celine can kill about the same plethora of enemies with just a regular master seal and promotion as well.
@fireembros1165 I do agree, Citrinne and Celine can do similar things to Anna in the mid to late game, but early on their better combat makes them less ideal for Micaiah because of Micaiah's utility being largely independent of her wielder
Anna's speed doesn't need a ton of fixing, so by the time the extra early investment is done, she can do the same things as Citrinne and Celine but surpass them in the mid to late game, in addition to her unique utility given to her by her personal skill which pays back the money she needed for class charges and weapons
So you need 4 main combat units from the Greil mercenaries to keep up with the enemies, for the first part (until 3-8) these units are going to be doing almost nothing but farming EXP for the 5 rout maps that they'll need to be a carry in (3-8 3-10 3-E and 2 part 4 maps) the other maps are mostly haar moving to the objective while they farm EXP uselessly in a corner RD in those parts is a pretty much exclusively Enemy phase oriented game, and 1 range enemies are everywhere.
you have realisically a few main options, Oscar, Mia, Gatrie and Boyd
Gatrie is very hard to rescue around an can't be shoved by many units, but he has the best stats
Oscar is unshovable, and the harsh terrain means he has difficulty in part 4
Boyd is shovable but he has speed issues (fixable with seraph robes and speedwings)
So this leaves Mia, who has bad STR but great speed
The main thing was you gave her the wrong weapon, RD has roughly 3 weapons that you'll actually use in the entire game, forged weapons Great weapons and 1-2 range, (typically forged). Forged weapons can have crit added and have higher hit than the great weapons but only have 1 more might, the Steel Greatland Poleax and Blade are the basic weapons of RD. Mia with a steel forge at base has 31 attack compared to shinons 36, and Gatries 41. However since Mia doubles at this point, mia's dealing 24 compared to gatries 22. Mia can also take advantage of Crit bonus of swordmaster and the steel forge to get her to unreliably (roughly a 43.75% chance) ORKO some enemies, improving EXp farming. Her combat until 3-8 is very meh, and mostly trash, but since she isn't haar it basically doesn't matter.
her advantage over Ike is that Ike is capped at level 20 while mia can promote before 3-8 (this is also her ONLY advantage). Shinon is much better than her until 3-8 (since mia mostly uselessly farms exp until then) but at around 3-8 you can actually get Mia to promotion (you could in theory promote shinon instead) but then in 3-8 3-10 and 3-E having 1 range is better than 2 range so suddenly mia outperforms Shinon
Mia's averages with 7 regular levels and 6 BEXP levels (which is I'll agree a lot of BEXP)
{'HP': 39.999, 'STR': 22.904, 'MAG': 7.925, 'SKL': 30.0, 'SPD': 30.0, 'LCK': 24.627, 'DEF': 20.312, 'RES': 12.775} (then her promo bonus's are 3 defense and 3 attack so 25 attack 23 defense)
It's one of these things where Mia's only real thing is that she A: doesn't require speedwings (isntead she wants BEXP which is still in demand but less so) and B: She can actually use those resources
TLD:R: mia is merely the best user of the less in-demand resources, typically you need 4 main GM combat units for part 4, and Mia does a good job as the 4th one
I wouldn’t call being better for 2 chapters (which I don’t agree with either) in which, Shinon can ALSO do 1-2 range and can have a way higher lead being Mia outperforming Shinon.
Are we also just gonna ignore that Titania is there and can double pretty much everything if she early promotes or do we not consider her a valid choice?
As far as the 4, for me it’s always been Ike, Haar, Titania and Shinon: they just meet the benchmarks required way faster and the only 1 that is locked to swords can make pretty good use of the wind edge (which is Ike)
@@fireembros1165 Oh whoops I meant to put titania as the 3rd
it's Ike, haar, titania, ???? and you need 1 ???? for the later parts.
I'd totally debate you in Mia vs shinon Post 3-8
my TLDR would be
Shinon Better in 3-P/3-1/3-2/3-3
mia better 3-8/3-10/3-E/4-1/4-4
Both equally worthless
3-4/3-5/3-8/3-10
What do you mean I shouldn't be giving all my energy drops to Hortensia? I'm not playing the game wrong, you're playing the game wrong.
Jokes aside, Favoritism isn't a bad thing, the game actively encourages it. It's all about using the units you want, I don't need to justify why I like Azel and always use him. We have S-ranks now but the Afa's drops are essentially a prototype version of that same mechanic.
I will always advocate for people using their favorites no matter what! That’s the most rewarding experience honestly. Good, bad, middling. Don’t matter. What matters is the enjoyment the player derives!
While I can respect that you don't think crits are something that should be gambled with when evaluating units, I do think it's a little silly to ignore them when that's sort of the entire gimmick behind the Swordmaster class. But, rather than debate that, I'd like to call attention to one crucial aspect of Mia's investment that you overlooked is Radiant Dawn's skill system. Specifically, the Adept scroll that Soren starts with.
Mia is easily the best user of that Adept scroll because she has the highest base speed and speed caps out of the Greil Mercs. At base she has a 10% higher chance of triggering it than Soren does, and as you said, she's already capable of doubling most enemies on Hard Mode. That means she has roughly a 50% chance to attack a third time, potentially even four times, all of which have a chance of critting (with the Wo Dao her lowest crit chance is 30% before applying her high skill stat, so mathematically speaking she's very likely to crit with 4 different chances), triggering another skill, or just getting that extra bit of damage necessary to secure a kill.
And, putting the Adept scroll on her is barely even an investment. Soren's 18 base speed and 35% growth isn't going to let him use it nearly as often, and his speed cap is 23 as a Wind Sage. Mia's base speed alone is already 5 higher than Soren's Tier 2 cap, and only 4 behind his Tier 3 cap. It's an absolute waste to keep it on him. As you've already pointed out, Ike, Haar, and Titania have the strength and bulk early on to not need Adept to perform well, so it's not like they're missing out on it either. Shinon is really the only other Greil Mercenary that can possibly use Adept early, but considering his enemy phase potential is much more limited as an archer, and his speed growth/cap is lower than Mia's, she's still the better recipient. She lacks 2 range early, but she can get Wind Edges to fix that.
I know that skills are RNG dependent, but unlike crits they aren't as reliant on weapon stats or class specific bonuses. RD has some very powerful tools available that absolutely influence a unit's performance, especially on the higher difficulties. Before even getting into stat boosters, forges, and bonus EXP, which I agree are more blatant examples of favoritism, skills really need to be considered as a resource. Mia just happens to be the character who objectively has the best chance to use this resource, and it massively improves her performance at minimal cost to the rest of the army. At the end of the day swordmasters ARE a crit reliant dodge class, so putting one or two skills on her to make securing kills more likely is what justifies further investment into her with forges and BEXP.
"Mia is easily the best user of that Adept scroll because she has the highest base speed and speed caps out of the Greil Mercs".
Guys. Shinon is RIGHT THERE. I'll take the 4% loss of it proccing any day to hit another strike with Shinon over having to forge a bajillion things AND give Mia adept. Why would I gamble on a low damage extra hit by the third chapter, when I can gamble on a higher hitting one for what, 4 less % on average?
We don't even need to go that far, even Titania can make solid use of it with 5% percent less than Mia if she caps Spd.
Even if I DON'T cap the spd, would I not rather take the chance for Titania to double over getting in a third worse hit with Mia.
And to add insult to injury, not only did you have to do everything i mentioned before, you now are giving Adept to Mia as well and somehow, we don't believe that's a little bit of a justification over actual investment? If we just keep adding things to make Mia more viable, obviously there'll be a point in which it'll justify itself. It doesn't mean she's the best user of it.
Also, wind edges? You know who can ALSO wield wind edges? Ike. Given the difference in bulk from Mia to Ike who do we really want challenging 1-2 range threats? And Wo dao is a 7 mt weapon. We were doing 1 more damage than base Ike at 20/20 with a forged 10 Mt weapon. It doesn't really help her much.
I don't know.. i feel like every time we just keep moving the goalpost to make it more "acceptable" to invest more and more resources in instead of just taking a step back and being like.. wait a minute, a lot of people do more work than she does.
Again, doesn't mean she's bad, but she's not the pinnacle of combat people try to claim she is.
@@fireembros1165Sorry for taking so long to reply, I'm really not used to commenting or getting responses on TH-cam. Appreciate you actually reading my comment though! And, I apologize in advance for the following wall of text.
So I want to clarify what I mean by "investment", especially in regards to that Adept scroll. I specifically look at skills by thinking "who will make this happen the most, and will it actually matter". On Hard Mode 3-P, Shinon and Titania will barely see any impact from Adept, while that scroll fixes a significant chunk of Mia's early issues.
Let's compare their performances by pitting all three of them against the the same generic steel axe warrior on Hard Mode 3-P, with 39 HP, 32 Atk, 15 Def, and 126 Hit. No WTA, no terrain bonuses, and I'm assuming 2 RN. Without critting or triggering skills, base Shinon w/ Killer Bow deals 28 damage over two hits, base Titania w/ Boyd's Killer Axe deals 20 in one, and base Mia w/ Wo Dao deals 18 damage over two hits. At a glance, Mia and Titania are performing similarly so long as Mia doesn't whiff, but Shinon is chipping significantly more than them.
On initiation, Shinon doesn't take a counterattack. Titania has a 75% chance to take 12 damage, and Mia has has a 46% chance to take 19 damage on the counter. That low defense hurts, but then again, Mia's pretty likely to dodge. This can apply to enemy phase too, but remember Shinon can't counter if the fighter initiates, so he has a 68% chance to take 12 damage.
Now, if Shinon crits a single attack, he one shots with 42 damage. If Titania crits, it's also a one shot at 60 damage. Meanwhile, if Mia crits, she only deals 27 damage, leaving the axe fighter with 12 HP and a chance to counterattack. If Mia's double doesn't crit, the axe fighter survives at 3 HP. So yeah, despite her regular damage not being THAT far behind Titania, she clearly struggles to kill the same enemy these two already can with one crit.
But now let's factor Adept in. Forgive my math if I'm a bit off, I tried very hard but multiplying percentages is weird.
So, Base Shinon has a 24% trigger rate twice per battle, which I believe comes out to about a 43% chance to happen once per battle, meaning a bit less than every other combat, but more than a 1/3 chance. He triggers Adept once, and he can kill without a crit. But, if he crits either of his first two attacks (I think he has a 63% chance of doing that btw), then Adept basically does nothing for him.
Thankfully Titania only has a single 21% chance of seeing Adept trigger here, so once every five battles against this goon, she one rounds him. But, much like Shinon, if she crits with her first attack even on the Adept proc, then the skill becomes overkill for her too.
Lastly, Mia has a 28% trigger rate twice per battle, so I'm pretty sure she's looking at a 51% chance of seeing Adept trigger at least once every combat. If she wins that coin toss and crits during any of those 3 attacks (I want to say that's a 71% chance of happening), it's actually useful to her, as she's now guaranteed to get the kill, rather than overkilling a unit.
So, Shinon is definitely killing more reliably with Adept, but at the same time he starts out with the stats to kill without needing it at all, potentially wasting its usefulness. On top of that, he has no enemy phase, so it just won't see any use there. Titania, on the other hand, isn't seeing Adept trigger often enough for her to actually rely on it during either phase. She's either overkilling, or she's not killing at all. How very Jagen of her. As for Mia? She's suddenly 3 times more likely to one round the axe fighter than Titania is.
But wait, it gets better. If Mia triggers Adept on initiation and crits both attacks? She kills without taking any damage, freeing up Mist and Rhys to heal someone else. If Vantage happens to be useful for once, then she just deletes someone on enemy phase instantly--that's more than you can say about Shinon. But, what if she doesn't crit with any of those 3 or 4 attacks? She's still dealing more damage than Titania now, even with her crappy RD Wo Dao. Heck, even with a steel sword she's dealing decent damage. That means everyone else has an easier time finishing off whoever she battles.
To summarize:
Adept makes Shinon, a unit who one rounds most enemies on player phase and does nothing on enemy phase, into... a guy who still one rounds most enemies on player phase and does nothing on enemy phase.
Adept makes Titania, a unit who one rounds generic enemies once every 4 battles with a crit, into... a character who one rounds every 4 battles with a crit and once every 5 battles with a double.
Adept makes Mia, a unit who struggles to kill at all without two crits due to low strength and a low might weapon, into a unit with more chances to crit, who depends less on multiple crits to kill, and who reliably deals more damage even when she doesn't one round.
THAT is what I mean by it being a better investment on her. Shinon and Titania are good enough at what they do already, so having Adept won't make much difference. Mia, on the other hand, makes the most use out of it, and on top of that, it actually benefits her every time it activates. She jumps from being a somewhat unreliable combat unit to one that actually performs on par with Ike, Shinon, and Titania. Why would you only want 3 powerful combat units when you could easily have 4?
So I truly can't see giving Soren's Adept scroll to Mia instead of the others in 3-P as a "significant investment" when no one else needs/wants it as much as her, and no one else sees as much of a boost to their performance then as she does. Keeping it on her or giving it to someone else later is up to you, but by then, your units will have gotten more levels and you may choose to allocate resources depending on who's doing well or not. Once you're at that point, Adept becomes an investment, and you can judge who needs it the same way you do stat boosters, weapon access, forges, BEXP, supports, and everything else. If Mia snowballed out of control and kills without needing Adept anymore? Throw it on Titania. If Titania got utterly speed screwed? Consider giving it to Shinon or Nephenee.
Thanks for responding and being so thorough. Couple of things. I will agree she can Maximize it's potential.. but i"m still not quite convinced on the argument she just uses it better during that part of the game.. and i'll counter a few points:
"But, much like Shinon, if she crits with her first attack even on the Adept proc, then the skill becomes overkill for her too."
Being overkill or not for Titania doesn't really matter, because the net result becomes either the enemy unit dies or it does not. Doesn't matter how MANY points the enemy dies by, they still will die no matter what if it procs as opposed to living prior.
On the Shinon argument, I do think you're completely ignoring that crossbows exist, can be trade out into his hand on playerphase (allowing him to use it enemy phase) and is still only marginally less damage than what Mia will do without heavy investment, meaning that if he has adepts and procs it, he either will kill it like Mia will or significantly harm it.
last:
"She's suddenly 3 times more likely to one round the axe fighter than Titania is.
But wait, it gets better. If Mia triggers Adept on initiation and crits both attacks?"
I Don't really agree with this. Like we said before, if Titania just has the 1/5 chance with adept, how is it more likely that she will over her with cumulative probabilities being taking into consideration of EVERYTHING proccing, a crit a dodge an adept. Titania JUST needs to proc adept.
All of this and we haven't even really touched up on the fact that how many successive rounds of combat will she ACTUALLLY perform with her almost non existent bulk? I'm still more comfortable putting it on a unit that can perform multiple rounds of combat, ergo, being able to see adept proc more often, than Mia who will get 1/2 chances (if you dance her) of proccing it on playerphase (before we factor in heavy investment in terms of level/promotion/support before she can reliably dodge tank).
I do agree her curve goes upwards towards the end of the game, but I don't really agree she's worth the investment or even doing all this amazing performance given it's all attributed to random chances as opposed to throwing those random chances on someone who has more bulk and doesn't require the resources to put out the higher numbers.
@@masterND96
@@fireembros1165
No worries, I do enjoy talking about these sorts of things! I'm glad to hear your thoughts, even if my opinion differs. I'll address your counters:
I believe situations where a skill procs when your unit would score the kill anyways does kind of matter here. Think of it this way--most RD mastery skills come free with tier 3 classes, but they're generally just fancier critical hits with added effects, like Stun or Deadeye. Thing is, you hardly every get to see those effects because most enemies die to the hit itself. What good does the extra effect do for your unit if the enemy dies anyways? Same deal here. Titania has the chance to secure kills without Adept's effect, and the effect triggers so infrequently on her that you won't want to bank on it until you level her up and promote her to the point where she can actually match the proc rate of a character like Mia or Shinon... except she won't, because Titania's speed is always going to be worse than theirs at similar or higher levels of investment.
I did ignore crossbows for my argument, largely because I was focusing entirely on their performance specifically in the prologue. Shinon doesn't have access to a crossbow until defeating the boss of that map. Even then, it's 28 mt and doesn't benefit from strength, so it's only 2 more damage than base Mia with a steel sword, who probably gained a level or two if you used her to get a few kills. With a 45% Str growth she'll catch up to that pretty quickly even without BEXP or a forged weapon. And, as far as investment goes, they'll cap speed and skill at around the same time, but Mia has a higher Spd cap in both tier 2 and tier 3, so she'll always have a better chance of triggering Adept if they're both deployed and used.
I will also admit that yes, Mia's potential is very much RNG dependent. Titania needs only one or the other while Mia needs both. Thing is, Mia having Adept turns her crit fishing from a prayer that won't usually get you a kill into something you can reasonably count on happening every combat. Titania with Adept is still just a prayer at that stage, so you really can't rely on it as much--especially since she has lower accuracy than Mia, so she might even whiff an attack and fail to kill. As I showed, Mia's damage with one Adept proc is similar to Shinon and higher than Titania, even without the crit. She's more likely to crit, and in turn, that allows her to consistently perform on par with them, all without invalidating their own strengths. They're both still really solid without Adept, so a more useful Mia ensuring key targets are taken care of means they and everyone else in the army will have an easier time overall.
I would assume that on 3-P, the worst your units should be taking is 2, maybe 3 attacks on enemy phase. Mia's bulk is lower than your other options at that point, yes, but let's do a bit of math. Say you completely overextended with her and she gets attacked by a whopping 4 enemies. She loses the coin flip and gets hit by the axe fighter, and takes that nasty 19 damage. Alright, she's at 15 HP. Swordmaster runs up next with his 25 Atk, manages to hit her with his roughly 60% chance too. She's hanging on at 3 HP. If she gets hit a third time by, say, the javelin halberdier with 26 Atk or the steel poleaxe warrior with 36 Atk (they both have under a 30% chance), then dang, she died. Guess you shouldn't have overextended. Now, lets throw Titania and Shinon into the fire! Both have the same defense, and would would take 12, 5, 6, and 16 damage from those same circumstances. Titania and her base 36 HP dies to that too, but due to her lower avoid, she's actually more likely to get hit by everything than Mia is. Shinon has somewhat worse avoid than Mia, but survives the bad RNG with 4 HP strictly because he has 43 at base. He's also done nothing to counter the squad beating him into the dirt, so good luck getting him out of that mess. Even Ike with his 44 HP and 21 Def barely makes it out of that alive. So, at worst, Mia takes 1 less hit to kill than Titania does, but has favorable odds of dodging 3/4 of those attacks. Mia actually has a very reasonable chance of surviving that scenario, and with Adept, she might even kill some of the enemies attacking her--Titania most likely won't, and Shinon absolutely won't. Her survivability really isn't as bad as you'd think, even without intense resource investment.
On that topic... I'm genuinely curious how much investment you think Mia really needs. From my typical RD run, by the time of 3-2 all I give her is Adept, an Ike support, and maybe one forged steel sword with some extra mt and crit. I do consider giving her Cancel, since Vantage->Cancel is a very silly sequence to watch happen, but I usually keep it on Nephenee. So, for essentially 2000 Gold I have a Mia who barely ever gets hit, and that kills most things in one round on both phases. That's... not a lot of trouble imo. Sure, once she caps skill, speed, and HP around level 13, I might drop a BEXP level or two in to get her strength and defense up, but she has a pretty solid chance of leveling those without BEXP or stat boosters. I just don't believe she needs the number of forges, stat boosters, and BEXP levels that you think she does.
As for your last point, all I can say is you do you. Personally, a big part of the fun with FE is the RNG factor behind everything. Swordmasters are inherently a risky class, so you do have to accept that if the odds aren't in your favor, they just won't seem as good. But, the more opportunities they have to roll the dice, the more likely they are to score big. In my experience, Mia makes that happen a LOT, and all it takes to get that snowball rolling is one skill scroll that no one else needs. I'm never unhappy with Titania or Shinon--they're reliable as they are. I find giving Mia Adept just makes her similarly reliable to them.
I guess ultimately our opinions just really differ because our playstyle in regards to fishing for dodge/crit chances. I prefer for my units to be reliable and consistent and, if I'm gonna use adept, I'd rather do it on a unit that can 1 round vs one that needs a higher probability string to do so. And yes, shinon doesn't have the crossbow, but it's only for 1 chapter. A remedial problem honestly at best vs the plethora of issues Mia faces IMO. Even surviving 1 more extra unit without having to roll the dice for me is more valuable, given it can soften enemies on enemy phase for some player phase afterwards. Like I said in the video, her bulk doesn't do any more favors as the game progresses, meaning it's not getting easier for her to tank more things. If anything she has to rely more and more on dodging, which I'm not a fan of if we don't have double earth afinity.
Now, i don't think Mia is bad per say, I think she's one of the better greil mercs, but I still do believe the investment required is everything I listed in the video. I still don't think "nobody else can use it as good as her" is a valid argument, for reasons I listed, but she probably does have the best chance of maximizing it, same as Zihark's situation. Albeit I do believe Zihark is better due to resolve access and just being generally in a harder part of the game and contributing more).
But 100% the beauty of FE is the different solutions people manage to come up with to different problems! I love the variety and tactics displayed, even If I don't agree with them at times!
@@masterND96
Don't forget the other side of the spectrum, intentionally killing off useful units as punishment for their insolence. RIP Camilla, Sain, and Shannan.
A slightly different Anna defence. She cost a lot less if you just keep her in warrior early on. A master seal and forging a radiant bow that you want anyway because it's awesome. Radiant bow warrior is only 3 might behind bolganone mage knight, probably less considering it's a cheaper forge. And her growth will beat Clanne's even in warrior. You can reclass when it is cheaper to do so or even keep her in warrior.
While it's easy to beat enemies on their res side in Engage, you still need to hit certain benchmarks to ORKO
C17 you need 39 atk to ORKO the majority of enemies (Generals, Berserkers, Halberdiers, Snipers) and 41 for the Paladins
10/14 Anna has 21 magic and can ORKO with a +2 Bolganone or just a tonic/meal with a regular one
10/14 Clanne has 15 magic, you need to somehow get him to do +8 extra damage with a Bolganone and even +7 just for the Generals.
And the benchmarks only get harder as the game goes on.
C22 is an important map that all units have to contribute
10/20 Anna has 26 mag,
10/20 Clanne has 17 mag
46 atk to ORKO the generals and Berserkers, 50 atk for the Warriors/Wyverns
Anna reach 46 with just Tonic/meal and +2 Bolganone, 50 atk might need a bit more lvling/spirit dust
But you can forget Clanne ORKO any of these without super investment. Even with +5 bolganone which is already unreasonable and tonic/meal he is 6 off ORKO just the generals.
The amount of favoritism Clanne needs is beyond reasonable
I think people didn't understand the message.. that I just use Clanne until Pandreo appears. Somehow we're thinking that I'm taking Clanne into endgame, which I clearly stated I'm not nor am I argueing that he's even remotely close to Anna in terms of that. But EVEN then Magic skill do exist to boost magic that we can inherit from Celica. (albeit they are expensive).
@@fireembros1165 i mistakenly assumed since we looked at promoted stats of 10/12 Anna vs Clanne and tried to damage fix Clanne with Celica inherit, which is something that happens endgame as you only have a short window until C10 to inherit it anything. Magic +2 for 1k SP is reasonable but Magic +3 already cost 3k SP that is beyond reasonable with 5 Well results.
Cyrils Bad bases on three houses is such a non issue since the second you promote him he gets the class bases of the class you're on so he doesnt even need to grow into good stats, that being said his growths without aptitude are pretty bad for Three houses standards
I use the units I like, amount of investment needed be damned. If I'm going to hold how much I have to invest into a unit against them than 90% of the units in each game are trash because they don't come prepromoted. I don't wish to hate most of the cast of any given game, and as a result I just make the conscious choice to not care how much I put into units provided they're doing what I need done in a reliable fashion.
Mia is not overrated she is amazing.
RD Mia is alright. Ike, TItania and Haar are probably the top 3 best units in the GM, so Mia would obviously compare worse to them, but Mia would be like the 4th or 5th best unit with Shinon among the GM. The rest of the GM have trouble doubling when Mia is basically guaranteed to double and does a ton with a forged weapon. (Might depend on how much gold Ilyana took from the DB, but it helps to max might, max crit forge a weapon for Mia)
I give citrine all the stats boosters in engage
So, I decided to rewind and listen back over the Anna section for Engage at the objective facts. Now All seems good and all, but I do have to question how 5 levels and Miccy's ring is on here. If you want 5 easy levels, Miccy is the built in level button of engage no questions asked. Yes there are other units that can use the ring, there's no denying that, but if you're gonna argue that 5 levels is a commodity for an early game unit, then Miccy's ring shouldn't be considered
adding on a master seal is very asinine too, like, I get that other units can use it, but the game still nets you enough master seals to promote a squad of 10 very easily over the course of the early game, and to hold it against an unpromoted unit just makes it sound like "if you aren't promoted, you suck". I would give points on the second seal being here, but realistically, most of the units in Engage aren't exactly frothing at the mouth to reclass, unless you're in Anna or Clanne's position (both being perfect mirrors in fact). I also find it weird how if you're gonna mention using Miccy's ring... Anna can just heal for that extra exp, so why does she need kills explicitly fed to her? I will admit if she doesn't have the ring, then you could definitely argue most of these points imo, outside of the master seal which is the equivalent of saying be a promoted unit as of this chapter
I can admit though that Anna is frail, but in a player phase focused economy, having one frail unit isn't the end of the world and far from a dealbreaker, especially on a difficulty like Maddening, where your units are already at a fair risk of dying just because of the enemy density and power of them, which makes having a long term project worth considering more than some of the safer picks. Anna is definitely not a top 10 unit for a difficulty like Maddening early on, but she's definitely a flat middle to potentially above average character overall, balanced by the better mid and lategame potential she has compared to her weaker early game
Content looks pretty promising though, so a sub has definitely been acquired today. Shame I only understood one character as I'm only better versed in 3 Fire Emblem games (with Engage slowly becoming my 4th from my current playthrough), but I do hope that in videos like this there can still be some more positive points to the units, as it does feel in comparison to the others taken into consideration, Anna and Mia mainly got dunked on and sound borderline unusable without any real counterpoints
Will again reiterate the content is amazing, but this is just some of the things I noticed as more of a late bloomer to the series (grew up on SD and Awakening, so my scales for units is pretty wobbly to say the least, but I did feel there were some points completely skipped over. Also, any time I say Miccy, it is Micaiah just to make sure that's clear)
So I’ll touch up on the master seal and why it’s important to consider it! And before anything thank you for the sub and for discussing!!
The master seal is important because the whole logic of Anna is to get her OUT of fighter and into her promoted class so she snowballs faster correct? The issue is, there are about 2 to 3 early master seals in the game before chapter 12 IIRC (without DLC, but don’t quote me on that). Two of those are basically no brainers in term of who to promote:
Chloe who is probably the best combat unit/only flier up to this point if you didn’t second seal someone else and alear for divine dragon bonuses or just for general combat/utility due to being present the whole game.
With your third seal that comes after chapter 12(and this is important, because so far Anna has been in the wrong class for about 5 or 6 chapters and, lvl 5 against your more leveled up units) you most likely than not have a better option for the promotion than Anna. Be it Celine/Amber a physical/magical unit of your choice.
The truth of the matter is: the more you delay Anna’s promotion the worse she is, but the EARLY master seals (before you can outright buy them) are highly coveted by better units. So how could it not be a direct resource to utilize an early master seal on her?
This isn’t to say Anna is bad. She’s obviously not, she’s got great endgame potential too.
But the amount of resources sunk into her is actually really really high when you consider it vs other units that have just been there doing a great job all along.
It's fun to have these types of civil discussions to flesh out the points, and I'll give my own thoughts on the master seal in my own rebuttals
First and simplest correction I'll make here is there's 4 Master seals pre chapter 12, as by chapter 9 you can buy one more, and there's three you get pre chapter 12 (Hortensia, Hyacinth, and a generic Archer in chapters 7, 10, and 11 respectively). Also, I would like to bring up one important point... who says Anna has to reclass at all? Sure, a 45% attack growth as Berserker isn't the craziest, but instead of reworking her, you can fully use her as a true axefighter, thus removing her extra investment entirely
I can't disagree that Chloe and Alear have good second sealing potential, but the limit for second seal comes in 3s by chapter 9, so you can definitely fit Anna into the mix even if it is a bit costly. She may not make up for it anytime soon, but she can eventually pay back that investment for herself, so it's not entirely unreasonable to give her the seal if you want to use her long term, with the payoff of a short term setback (I won't say how much she makes as that's not a point I feel is worth considering, but earning back what she needs is a fair part of the assessment)
Depending on the way you spec Anna, this statement could very well be true (for the sake of argument, I will assume it's second seal Anna as that's what the point here makes), and she does seem to get worse the longer you wait, but her personal 50% magic growth is enough for her to not get royally screwed on magic, meaning she can survive the wait for even post chapter 12 an okay amount
I think the amount of resources Anna needs does partially depend on the playstyle, but to say she needs so many things when in the examples provided, Miccy's ring countered a lot of the arguments made in the vid. Will say I think there is some favoritism going on for Anna, but I don't think it's as egregious as it's made out to be, she needs some level of investment, and over time she'll turn out reasonably good, though considering the power level of Engage, I can see why she might be easy to see as falling more by the wayside and needing more than her potential competition
(Even though I let Citrinne shrivel to dust because her thunder tome made her look like the world's worst mage, which is something I only noticed sitting at chapter 18, hooray showing active speed instead of a base and minus weight, I considered using her for my first playthrough but 4 AS made me figure she's the single worst magic unit, and that says a lot with Clanne who is just in the wrong class set)
@@shinyraikou1518 yeah she’s definitely a little more on the mid/endgame reward side and I don’t quite find it appealing, but can see that sometimes prefer those bigger payoffs and it’s fine too!
We didn’t even discuss how she needs the Milky Way. Most important thing ever ahhahah!
I actually kinda like Clannes innate mage knight a lot and think people have been sleeping on frame for quite a while, but again,engage has this beauty of making anybody work!
I think people underestimate the power of effective weaponry tbh, Berserker Anna gets access to forged hammers and poleaxes, as well as pretty much exclusive use to the hurricane axe since not a lot of the units of Engage particularly care, but yeah, if you don't find the appeal in later payoff units, then Anna is for sure a lost cause
And nah, she doesn't need Miccy if you reject her magical nature, let her pop off with Roy early on and lategame pivot into Ike/Byleth, and her effective weaponry tools skyrockets her into a smiter of cavs/armors/fliers and eventual dragons. But in all seriousness, yeah, to mitigate all her other needs, Miccy is needed for a magical Anna for sure, but I don't always care for conventional means of raising units (like how I'm using Boucheron for my hard/classic run because I think he's funny and call him Frenchie for an instant chuckle)
I never cared for Clanne having an abysmal magic growth by later FE standards (10% personal? He's as able as Merric from SD to put it into perspective), and Framme is definitely usable as healers are always good in FE as a whole, and Engage goes a step further imo as adding an option to give units random growths means any unit could be the MVP, even butt of the jokes Bunet could become a diamond with this feature, which is the direction I hope to see FE continue, making it so any unit can be the best, and it really depends on the playthrough meaning adaption becomes a key factor
Two units I think would be interesting for this kind of discussion are Leif from Genealogy of the Holy War and Jill from Radiant Dawn.
Also worth noting is that multiple units most players considered to be amazing still benefit from some form of investment. In Radiant Dawn, for example, Haar greatly appreciates some BEXP to get to tier 3 sooner and/or some forged axes. Giving the Laguz Royals some BEXP can help them reach doubling thresholds and the like.
Originally I was going to do Jill, but opted for Mia because there is some argument to be had that Jill contributes more on a harder part of the game with lesser competition for valuable resources (due to her and Zihark just being leagues ahead of everyone else), so I left her alone... for now.
@@fireembros1165I mean her class alone is obscenely powerful
@@fireembros1165 ah Jill, we still can't really figure out if it was worth investment stacking her or just use Master Crown Tauroneo.
There are very good arguments on both sides that it is hard to figure out if it's worth.
Investments in Ross and Garcia are very reasonable to me 😂😂😂
Seeing how I gave Lapis every stat booster I found, the Roy ring, build +5, made her a wyvern, made a +5 crit tomahawk for her, and married her I think I was just doing the doing the minimum to make her a good unit XD
I call these units “copium.”
give seliph all the things make seliph kill all the things
make game go faster
still can't protect you from oops shananananan didn't dodge the dark mages
I would say that Mia is most definitely not the most favoritism investment in Radiant Dawn. She's arguably the best Trueblade in the game, and if you want one of them, she's going to be your best bet. She's certainly weaker than most of the other combat units in her midst and honestly I think that's not because she's bad, the other units in the Greil Mercs are just silly. The worst part about her is starting with lower Str and swords as a weapon type being objectively worse than axes in almost every way (but not lances trying to be a weird middle ground and failing). Radiant Dawn is designed in a way that lets the player commit to favoritism harder than ever without introducing the hell that is reclassing and internal levels. I like to think of this topic as more of a spectrum than a venn diagram. Mia is more favoritism than units like Titania, Jill, and Shinon (Ike is required so that's a little unfair) but she's more of a reasonable investment than a unit like Lyre, Lucia, or Heather. This is a fantastic video though, and the only thing I disagree on as a whole is Anna, as Engage is exponentially harder in the last third of the game compared to everything that comes before it, and the stat differences between Anna and Clanne in mage knight are not negligible by that point in the game. Engage just values long term investment significantly more than shorter term selections, and another benefit Anna has is the ability to make a lot of gold in the process, which is dumb silly stupid when you remove weapon durability and your forge is super powerful. She not only lessens the burden for herself by funding top of the line forges (Dogs are objectively the best animals in Engage they give you ores) but she gives you money to do it for the rest of the team, too.
Just want to point out to you that I'm currently doing an Engage run that i can ONLY utilize Anna's gold generation (after she joins). We're on chapter 18 and I've done some DLC paralogues and Lucina/Lyn paralogue. She so far has only made 5k gold.
There's a HUGE disconnect between how much money you ACTUALLY make with Anna and how much money you ACTUALLY NEED to beat the game. At this point, I basically go through almost every chapter without doing forges or buying new weapons and just switching weapons between people. I've had to choose units that were already promoted for the most part, because I can't afford the reclassing costs nor the master seal values.
Anna's gold generation is only high if you SPECIFICALLY dedicate a ton of resources to making it happen, which isn't really necessary to complete the game and, in reality, takes more effort than to just go on without her. I did a quiz a while back that basically shows the math behind it.
TL;DR
Anna's combat is good mid-endgame, but you have so many options it's hardly necessary to use her. Her gold generation is severely overhyped by players and not even remotely as efficient if you're not grinding/dedicated to farming gold.
@@fireembros1165 That is fair, though I don't think anyone has claimed she makes enough on her own to buy a castle without actually playing through the game normally. She just provides a noticeable benefit on top of what you're already given, and realistically speaking it's going to be different for every individual player.
You opted out of talking about the Wo Dao for Mia due to crits being heavily RNG based, and I am completely in agreeance on that. Make a Killing is a Lck% trigger on kill, and on average it would activate once a map or twice every three if you're raising a unit like Anna that needs early kills to catch up since she is recruited with somewhat underwhelming stats and enemy reinforcements are plentiful on higher difficulties. Once she reaches internal level 18 and would under normal circumstances have about 10 Lck without any goddess icons you would be able to expect two triggers in a map if you're still feeding her and one otherwise.
Just considering chapters 7-18 (removing 11 for obvious reasons) with no additional paralogues, training, or whatever, that would net you about 4.5k. Since I don't believe it's an argument worth fighting over as her contributions are still noticeable on a normal run even if they aren't absurd and game breaking enough to carry a run, so the numbers are rough as I'm not going to put in the additional time to go through every single map for enemy counts and reinforcements and all that, as the curve for that data would be more generous in Anna's favor in later maps than it would be for early maps and would theoretically balance out.
Personal anecdotes of proc skills will always have some level of user bias to them no matter how data orientated you are, and most people don't tend to care for theoretical statistics because when the 20% astra doesn't activate across 7 combats the numbers don't mean anything to them anymore. This can be seen in the hit rate debate where some argue for 1rn, others 2rn, and a 3rd group prefer hybrid, people in general are really bad at accurately perceiving probability and theoretical averages are not satisfying despite being the hypothetical "standard experience".
If you were to do a single map multiple times trying to get gold from Anna's skill you would more than likely not end up with the same amount every time It'd be 0, 1, or 2 in most cases depending on the stage of the game.
TLDR
Anna isn't a Bank but she's definitely a worthwhile paycheck for those using her under normal circumstances, and trying to determine the value of a % chance proc skill is never going to be reliable without extreme measures, which simply don't exist in Engage. Maybe in the 3DS era some units could. Overhyped, yes the Anna fans are crazy, insignificant, no it does help in the long run.
These are the same thing
How do you do a whole segment on engage anna and not bring up her personal skill. Her gold manufacturing while takes a while to really get rolling is an easy 20k extra gold a playthrough that can be used on forges and well fodder that increases your whole army's viability and she's the only unit with the ability to contribute like this. It's her best asset and is unique to her.
I really believe you guys may be overrating A:
how much gold is actually generated/vs how many kills you need to specifically feed her, which then again revisits the topic of set up and favoritism justifying a setup
and more importantly B:
how much gold is actually needed to complete the game.
@@fireembros1165And also C:
How much Luck points Anna would need for her personal skill to consistently give you Gold.
Yeah Mia was underrated for a while but saying she's good in Radiant Dawn is a stretch. She's still a footlocked unit with bad bulk in a heavily enemy phase oriented game, who competes for resources with some of the best units in the game, and only ever kills anything if you get lucky with adept/crits.
The recommended build for Mia is to give her adept (Soren will thank you for that), transfer a silver blade / killing edge / energy drop from other parts, give her 4 or 5 levels asap to cap her speed and skill and then dump a bunch of bexp to cap her other stats. This is an utter waste of resources in my opinion. Why are you using your valuable bexp on a mediocre slot machine unit when you could use it to give speed level ups to Haar after he caps str/def ? And even if you benched Haar for some reason, Shinon is literally better than Mia at her own niche. He can't enemy phase either, but unlike Mia he has an actual strength stat, and can also promote earlier. Even Gatrie is better than Mia, he has more bulk and his speed is more than correct when he reaches tier 3
Mia is fun to use because intermittent reward is addictive to the brain, but she's not a good unit
The list of stuff anna needs feels kinda wrong. Like if youre giving her micaiah she does not need any kills and it gets her to level 5 rather easily. And since shed be heal botting she doesnt really need protection she just sits in the back.
Micaiah healing xp is something youre going to be doing for someone at that point in the game anyways and its not the most contested resorce. While their are other choices theyre kinda all mediocre magic units I dont think choosing the 1 that has better late game scaling and some free extra money is particuarly egregious favortism.
Like you mention clanne and pandreo as easier units for similar results. Clannes only less investment though is that he doesnt need a second seal but anna would earn more money than thats worth and as you self admitted have better late game stats. And pandreo does not join the army until after she should already be online so they arent really incontention for the same resources anyways
I’ve actually done a video on how much money Anna makes during a run on average and it’s most certainly not as much as people think to justify a whole run on her. And Pandreo joins the army in the first chapter after you lose the rings, in which she’s not really “online” by any means. She never your best option for mage knight at any point of the game, with always someone else being a better alternative stat wise for less investment, be it a bigger magic stick with spd fixing or faster but with magic fixing. And in the case of Pandreo and veyle, neither:
@@fireembros1165 i dont think its worth justifying a whole run on her but its at least more than the price of second seal thats were saying clannes less investment for not using lol
You can deffo have her combat ready by his join map and even if you dont he doesnt need a master seal or micaiah xp. & theirs more then enough deployment spots to justify running two magic units in. So no they arent really competeing for anything.
The only way I really see them competeing is if youre choosing to go significantly under youre given deployment slots so that youre only funneling xp to a couple of characteracters. In which case yeah sure but id argue that playstyle in inherently favortism for any unit youre choosing to run
@@ivanbackfromthecardshop8093 but the issues here is that you’re competing Anna with Clanne, when I specifically state in the video that clanne is like the not good option. Her real competition early game is stuff like Celine/Citrinne and even Yuanaka for the micaiah experience (given that Yunaka has the most diminishing returns on kill exp). I just used clanne to show that even if you only decided to use clanne to later on bench him, he would reach most of the thresholds that Anna would for that portion of the game, for less of a cost.
@@fireembros1165 yeah like i said their are other options shes not just free too add too the team. I just dont think any of the other early game users stand out as so drastically better that choosing not to use miciah on them is a strong degree of favortism.
Like annas traits that make her "higher investment" is that she starts out of class so she would be theoretically harder to train up (ignoring the radiant bow warrior build). But since her own passive pays off the 2nd seal cost and micaiah coverts the user into a good staff user while training so these downsides of this dont functionally do anything
Anna makes everyone else better because of gold.
You already have so much gold that hers is irrelevant
@@hanzou1238and trying to proc Making a Killing with her luck bases is like making eggs benedict without any eggs
Horse units in radiant dawn arent good in most maps infantry becomes more valuable over all
Aw yea Farina propaganda 🔥🔥🔥.
I think a lot of early fliers fall perfectly into “reasonable investment”. Shanna and Vanessa are some of the best examples of this; relatively lower in terms of pure combat at first, but have a very high ceiling with their flight and other unique attributes.
100% even if you just dump them later, they absolutely can put those resources to work
Go physical with clanne
I feel like there's a huge disparity between people wanting to enjoy the game with units they like and have fun with, and "elitism," where if you're not sticking to units that you got within the first 10 chapters, or if you're using a mage that you get late game over the two sages you got early game, despite, statistically, that mage can promote into a way more viable and superior sage with a little investment, you're playing the game wrong..... I'm DEFINITELY not speaking from experience...
I'm not advocating for people NOT to use specific units. Please, use ANY and ALL units you like. Never let ANYBODY dictate how you play.
This video is merely to point out that sometimes people get carried away in a discussion, but ignore actual numbers and contributions that a unit can make. Doesn't make the unit bad. It just means that we shouldn't let our personal opinion interfere with an objective look at things.
I can agree Lilina is not the best mage option or even a good unit in FE6. Nonetheless I use her EVERY playthrough (sometimes because Lugh died in an ironman =/) because she fits my playstyle very well. Does it make her good? Not necessarily, but it works for me.
Anna is probably best in warrior since she makes the best use of the Radiant bow while still being decently fast and while not very strong but serviceable. She does a good job and only needs a master seal and 5 levels. Mage Anna is a neat idea but really isn't super worth it. You need to promote her then reclass since if you reclass before promotion she ends up with a higher internal level with lower growths. In fact at the same internal level going axe->mage->mage knight she only has 1 more magic and resistance compared to just going Axe->Promoted class->Mage knight which has 2 more hp and strength and 1 more spd and defense. Other then that all else is the same.
Mage knight Anna is probably going to be better then Clanne and Celine(early game unit syndrome) but marginally better then citrinne who has a higher base magic which would take anna's growths over 40 fucking levels to surpass at the same internal level. Buuuuut its like two points in the mid game compared to her lead in speed which is like 3-4 points. In general it isn't super worth it to invest in early game units(usually before chapter 8) because.....they have early game unit syndrome which affects them super badly compared to the mid game units who are amazing
Actually Anna going into berserker first is what people usually do. They never go backwards for it, doesn't make much sense. They grind out the remaining 5 levelsl on axe fighter, promote, then promote into mage knight immediately.
For Comparison. Mage knight Anna actually has superior stats in EVERY stat over mage knight Citrinne minus resistance(both promoted at 10).
To be honest even then I wouldn't recommend Anna. Citrinne can do that big magic damage buld as sage, but as mage knight, she's comparatively worse than other units. Now if you're keeping Citrinne sage that's a different argument, but I do honestly prefer the mage knight class because, until you get bolganone, forged levin sword will probably outdamage most spells in the game.
Nah I don't like the Mia argument. You can't say it's objective but then also disregard critical hits when its more than 50% of her damage output. She's also your only unit consistently doubling in the first half of Part 3 and routinely your best choice when you just need some specific unit gone while also having a decent enemy phase for placing here there (better than Shinon anyway). You're also focusing your comparison against Ike and Titania, both of which are hard S tier units. Mia simply being A tier is totally fine. In PoR yeah she needs a forged steel sword and a few good early level ups before the growths and Vantage+ take over, but I don't think she needs any of that in RD.
She’s not the only unit consistently doubling in part 3 though. The only thing that she can double and no one else can are swordmasters, which are few and far in between. Also she cannot enemy phase like Shinon. That’s just not true. She’ll die in 2 hits of any combination of sword user/lance user/axe user. Whereas Shinon can tank 3/4 units sometimes without fear of death due to bulk and def. She NEEDS the earth affinity support to consistently be able to dodge, which is not a point in her favor.
I do agree she’s good with investment, but that’s just it, it’s a lot of investment when other units can hit those thresholds a lot faster, namely Shinon, or Boyd who can also an interesting wrath vantage build with colossos.
The investment Anna needs to get online isn’t actually much higher than the investment you give to every other unit, in most engage runs their isn’t even another unit that wants it instead of her.
She joins at level 5 at a time when everyone else is joining at 10 so yes she needs higher investment. The other units that her level are Alfred, Etie, and Boucheron who join 4 maps and 1 1/2 Paralogues earlier and by chapter 4 Louis and Chloe are already a higher level and don't need feeding to be good. Anna is just a bad Pandreo/Ivy and only worth using if you like her.
I think the benefit from using Anna in a lot of games is that she can actually farm you gold. In engage I'd say her investment is not those things you listed, but whatever Goddess Icons you come across; she's fine in berserker. On the Day 1 release of the game, extra gold was a pretty valuable resource to have access to. Things have changed with the way they've patched the game. She remains a unit that offers something that other units don't offer, the ability to gain resources that can be used for the rest of the game instead of only in the current map. It's something. Very similarly, Radiant Dawn Brom gets better at Disarming enemies with more Skill (and speed, if you can double,) which means access to more stolen weaponry. All the thieves in thracia and fe9/fe10 gain the ability to steal better things when their stats go up. Your investment into these units does more than just make you better at combat! We can do better than just beating the map; there's profit to be taken!
There are also cases where a unit takes a resource that isn't all that competitive in order to become something more- I think of Boey taking the speed shrine in Gaiden/Echoes so that he's a much more competent unit. The other units you have don't really need anything more.
FE4 is unique among these games as the most competitive resource is fought over not by your units, but their weapons. You wanna get those weapons to 50+ kills quickly, but you also want to get the weapons that are the strongest to 50+ kills, and you get those later. So you end up having to weigh committing getting your Fire Tome or Silver Sword to that point, or starting over accruing kills with a Thunder Tome or Light Brand when you receive those.
im not even the biggest fan of Anna but you definitely undersell anna gold passive, also speed fixing uses more bond fragments, while dmg fixing require more sp by a margin(gentility, resonance, mag+, etc).
Armpits.
I made my case
In defense of Anna. It is very reasonably possible to grind Anna from level 5 -> 10 the map after you get her. (Bridge map, Chapter 7)
It only takes about 2 well planned Great Sacs and some good Plus Shaped Mend casts. No combat needed. And thats it. Then just promote her and use her in 8, then second seal for 9. And give Mic Ring to someone else. Give Anna Lief to help her build out. Then give her Byleth if you aren't giving him to Alear. She likes every stat Byleth gives and Dex instruct can synergize with Dex activation checks if you enjoy that kind of team comp. Celica, Lyn, Olwen, and maybe Sigurd/Roy(?) could work if Byleth is too competitive I guess.
The real cost of Anna isn't Mic Ring. It's the early use of Master Seal and bond fragments for weapon mastery. Whether that counts as favoritism is up to you.
Just don't do what I did and make her into a Bow Knight W/ Hex and Claude Wind Ring. Hoo boy did it not turn out well.
I agree that Micaiah ring usage isn’t that big of a “cost”, and it shouldn’t be counted as favoritism. Someone will get to use the ring anyways, and at that point of the game there isn’t really anyone who needs to use the ring more than Anna. Yunaka, the most recent joined unit before Anna, already made enough use out of Micaiah ring on her join chapter and Anna chapter. Framme (and Jean to some extent) can just farm EXP by fort Chain Guard, or simply do their healing. The later units (from ch7 onwards) already start at lv10, so they don’t need Micaiah either. So who really contests Anna for the use of Micaiah ring anyways?
Or you could just get her to level 10 and then either forge a silver bow into a shining bow or wait until chapter 14, promote her into Warrior and keep for there for chain attacks and picking off flying enemies due to having the best magic growth for warriors
@@sam7559 yes, putting Anna into Warrior and give her Radiant Bow is very low effort and still makes her work. Towards the late game when Second Seal isn’t limited anymore you can put her to Mage Knight or Sage like intended.
@elainasjournal5734 yeah but why at that point reclass her into mage knight and lose out on what is likely your best bow user for targeted removal of fliers?
@@sam7559 it depends on what you want to get out of Anna imo. If you want a serviceable unit with minimal investment then just keep her at Warrior. If you want to use her at her highest potential for late/end game contents or just want to do the money farming shenanigans, then change her to a magic class with higher Lck cap. Sometimes you already have enough units to deal with fliers too, so reclassing Anna could be better than keeping her at Warrior. It’s just a matter of what role you want her to fill tbh.
I really enjoy your content, so I hope this doesn't come off as rude, but your assessment of Anna in engage seems pretty disingenuous.
First of all, her opportunity costs are nowhere near as high as you made it sound. At this point in the game ALL units want Master Seals, her opportunity cost there is the same as everyone else. Meanwhile Second Seals are much less in demand, so while that is a cost of running Anna, its fairly negligible. Also who else is going to use Micaiah over her? What big opportunity are you missing by having Anna use Micaiah this early on when nobody needs her? Micaiah at this point in the game is just a free leveling button, and Anna is easily the best unit to press that button. As for "protecting her", Anna at level 5 has more HP than Celine and Framme at level 10.
Secondly, she is really easy to raise without any babying just playing as a regular support unit. There is videos of people getting Anna all 5 levels she needs with Micaiah by farming with Great Sac in one single map, and if you don't want to farm and just want to play normally? Then it takes 2 maps, which is fine. Heck, even if you take 3 maps to get Anna those 5 levels using Micaiah because you don't want to slow down at all, she will still be one of your best units soon. At this point in the game none of your other characters really need Micaiah, so why not?
Third, you listed all her costs, but completely ignored one of her biggest benefits, especially on Maddening. She makes you money. Sure it isn't crazy amounts, but assuming average luck and an average kill count among your DPS she will earn you quite the tidy sum over the course of the game, giving your units a few more upgraded weapons or more four-star wells to farm SP.
Lastly, your comparison with Clanne was awful. 5 MAG difference at the end of the game isn't that big of a deal, but in your comparison at IL 20 it is a gigantic difference, you don't easily have enough SP at this point in the game to make up this difference like you implied without utterly ignoring all your other characters. Not only that but you didn't bother to compare later on, like say IL 35 where Anna has a whopping 11 MAG advantage over Clanne. In fact, at IL 35 Anna completely blows Ivy out of the water too (Anna is also beats Ivy at IL 20).
Anna is easily one of the best units in the game, and unlike many other "trainee" units her opportunity cost is low (thanks to Micaiah) and her reward is insanely high (thanks to her passive and bonkers growths). Give her a try sometime, just slap Micaiah on her for a couple chapters and treat her as an aggressively healing support until she is level 10, reclass her into Mage Knight and give her Sword Power +1-2 early on with a Levin Sword, and she instantly starts slaying. Since you get her early, you can take advantage of Sword Power on a Levin Sword before Roy goes poof after chapter 10.
As I said at the start of my comment though, I do enjoy your content, defo subscribing to see more in the future.
I did actually say that Anna at the end of the game is superior to Clanne. I particularly chose Clann PRECISELY because he is mediocre and can meet the thresholds. If we take other magical units, the lead is worse.
Even if the SP cost is high (which I also state) the fact of the matter is that you CAN fix it. And also since you brought up the well.. are we really gonna try to paint SP as a problem?
You cannot fix Anna's spd if you needed to until Lyn shows up. Which may not be a big detriment... but still is one.
I also do wanna point out that I think you may be overrating 2 things:
A - How much gold is generated vs having to set up kills to get said gold (which then again feeds into the loop of, she's SO GOOD, because she's getting gold and experience, because I'm setting up kills for her)
B - How much gold is actually needed to beat the game.
Also, the Micaiah argument is never one I understood. Celine is right there with reasonable access to a bunch of unique defining qualities and would greatly appreciate the experience. Clanne can as well. Chloe to snowball harder. Jean if you want a specialized unit, or as a matter of fact ANY other unit that you want to use. If it happens to be Anna, great, but let's not try and frame it as if she makes "best" use of it.. because that's not quite the case.
Last, the master seal may not be a competition.. but let's look at no DLC. You get 1 or 2 before chapter 12 if IIRC. The 2 options will most likely be Chloe and Alear, but even if you didn't or you had a third one, still needs a second seal. At base with the second seal, Anna is STILL struggling, due to coming off a bad class. But , just as a tech example, base Amber as a great knight with Sigurd can SOLO the top portion of the Kagetsu/Zelkov/Ivy snow map. So.. is it really that there's nobody that would want it more or that we would prefer to invest into Anna for the long run and justify her usage?
Again, totally respect your opinion and see where you're coming from for a long term investment (which admittedly can make the endgame portion easier if you struggle more with that). I am grateful for the comment! I don't take offense to any of it and hope you don't either!
@@fireembros1165
Anna isn't just superior to Clanne, she is pretty much superior to every single mage end-game except for like Pandreo (assuming similar investment and level).
Also that the idea that because you CAN fix it as an excuse to compare Clanne and Anna a little silly. Yes, you CAN fix it, but its still a disingenuous comparison. It's like saying that Kagetsu ain't that great, and doing a comparison with Lapis as she is close in stats and you CAN fix it (IL 20 both on Wyvern Rider, she is -2 STR and -1 SPD).
As for Anna's early-game SPD, give her Leif (absolutely not a contested emblem) as a level 1 MK with levin sword on chapter 9 with either a +2 SPD meal or a SPD tonic she is 1 SPD off of doubling even the pegasus knights on this map. Which she promptly gets in 1 level. Not only that, she can pretty much hold one side of the map alone (maybe with some healing, magic units aren't that tanky). That said, even if you don't do the meal/tonic and she can't double the pegasus knights, she still is one of your better units immediately. She gets even better from there thanks to her massive SPD growth.
As for the things I overrated:
A - While I probably should have mentioned that she doesn't generate much gold early game due to her low LCK (she does have good LCK growth), this changes as you reach the mid-game. Also you don't need to "set up kills" once she hits MK she starts one-rounding pretty easily with the same investment you would give other DPS units.
B - Yes, you don't need Anna's gold generation to beat the game, far from it. However it is something she brings to the table, and it is a non-negligible benefit. Extra forges and higher star rating on your wells thanks to her extra gold does make a difference.
Why would you give Celine Micaiah over Anna? Celine can already use staves, and Celine falls off a cliff mid-game and at this point in the game her magic is still useful, she should be hitting things. Clanne is significantly worse than Anna as a magic class and horribly outclassed by pretty much any of the meta physical units if you decide to go that direction, the EXP from healing is wasted on him, he should be out there help setting up kills for other units. Chloe is one of the best units in the game, she should be killing things for EXP, why would you use her as an example for Micaiah? Jean is the inferior trainee unit, his base growths are so low in MAG that even as a MK he is 5% lower MAG growth then Anna after his passive boost, and you have to raise him from level 1. Anna easily makes the best use of it.
Lastly the master seal thing. This is where its a pretty fair competition. However there are honestly not many units in the early-game that are worth keeping. Which earlygame unit deserves it more than a unit that will immediately be able to start destroying maps, gets even stronger mid-game, and is comparable to the best magic unit in the game, Pandreo, come late-game, and she makes you money. If I remember correctly you get 3 master seals early, one from Anna's chap, one from clapping Hort in chapter 7, and 1 from the shop after chapter 8 (after that its 2 more from the shop after chapter 11). This is no DLC.
Yes, there are other units you can use over her that can pop off too. You can't bring every unit to the end-game so you have to make choices, your end-game team should probably consist of 5-7 heavily invested units with the rest being supports, there are lots of really strong mid-game units, so bringing 3 units to hyper-invest from early-game is about right. However Anna brings a lot of benefits and her opportunity cost is a lot lower than people make it out to be, due to her great cost versus gain ratio I think that she is one of the best units to invest in in the game currently.
Also a little fun fact. Framme makes a pretty good Bonded Shield user, as she gets supports with Chloe, Kagetsu, Timerra, and Anna. Which are all some of the best units in the game (though Timerra needs a pretty specific build or she sucks, but when she does have the right build, she is probably the strongest unit in the game).
Thanks for replying, sorry if I come off as harsh, I actually quite enjoy discussing these types of things.
@@Lagoon4296 we can’t really say she’s superior to Ivy. Ivy still flies and has access to staves which is absolutely busted combination in Engage. Utility alone it’s almost unrivaled. Leif is around for like 2 chapters before the poor guy vanishes, but we still haven’t touched in the elephant in the room which is: are you giving Anna one of the early master seals? Also need that second seal for the Pegasus strat and which side is she holding alone? Are we really tanking Kagetsu and the 5 knights by herself or zelkov and their five knights? The Amber example is him using only vulneraries and Sigurd on him. At base with reclass to Great knight.
Honestly it really comes down to that. If you think she’s the best recipient of that early master seal, then there’s absolutely nothing I can say that will convince you otherwise and I respect that playstyle decisions.
If you say no, then we have to acknowledge she will be stuck in a bad class, needing to be protected and minimally contributing for about 6/7 chapters, which then leads to the evaluation of how much we need to get her to perform.
@@fireembros1165
Personally I think she is MUCH better than Ivy.
While yes, being a magic flyer is a nice boon, if you are really hankering for flying magic damage griffon knights with levin swords will suffice for all but the highest RES targets, in which case a griffon knight could use a physical weapon (or just throw a wyvern at it). Against most enemies the difference between magic damage and physical is not that big, the big outliers are the magic units with their high RES (and griffons) and Armors with high DEF.
Also yes, Anna loses Leif in two chapters, but by then her really high SPD growth has made up for the lack of Leif, as he was just a temporary helper.
Let's also not forget that Ivy also takes much more investment than Anna. She needs to be HIT fixed as her DEX is bad (low growth and 23 cap), she needs to be LCK/DDG fixed as her base and growth for LCK are godawful, she needs heavy investment in SPD if you want to keep her doubling, as she is not only quite a bit slower than Anna at similer IL, but she also has worse SPD growths. Heck, Ivy joining and immediately promoting to Lindwurm as IL 16 has the same SPD as Anna at Mage Knight level 1 (IL 9).
Ivy is good with HIGH investment, like pretty substantial, or she falls off a cliff. She is a still a good unit, but she only really gets that status due a lack of good magical units and due to having a magical flying unique class. Also most of our magical units are early-game units, and Ivy doesn't need to compete for an early game Master Seal as completing chapter 11 adds some master seals to the shop, so thats another point in her favour.
Heck, even griffon knight Anna is a better magic flier than Ivy on Lindwurm as long as you give her Sword Power +2-3 and Levin Sword to make up for the Griffin Knight's rather poor base MAG. Ivy can't do this due to not having access to swords on Lindwurm or Roy. In this scenario Anna is a strictly better flying magic unit than Ivy.
As for your yes-or-no ultimatum, isn't that in itself kinda silly? It goes for every unit in the game that needs a master seal. Lets use your statement but switch it with Amber: "If you say no to Amber, we will have to acknowledge he is stuck in a bad class, needing to be protected and minimally contributing for about 6/7 chapters, which then leads to the evaluation of how much we need to get him to perform".
The reason this is a bad argument for why you would evaluate Anna on "how much we need to get her to perform" is that it goes for literally every character. There are not enough resources to build all the units in the game and have them perform on maddening, in fact trying to do so would definitely make it incredibly hard.
Anna does NOT need much extra compared to other characters in the early-game, and her payout is comparable if not better than some of the best units in the game. You only have 3 early seals, so you can only take 3 units from the early game and really make them shine.
Would I pick Anna over Amber? Yes, he is outclassed or easily replaced by Kagetsu, Panette, and Merrin. If we throw in Chloe, then we already have 4 very strong physical DPS units, also lets not forget Alear who we are forced to drag along. Meanwhile on the magical side we have Pandreo (who is GOATed), thats it. The other mages in contention are Citrinne who is bad without Dire Thunder and Ivy who is mid without heavy investment.
I would absolutely take a really strong magical unit that makes me money on-top of being insanely good, yes.
I guess in the end we can chalk it down to playstyles and choices I guess, though I don't understand why some people are so afraid of having Anna heal for 2 maps just to have her pop off for the rest of the game, eh whatever. This is the first FE I would argue where Trainee units are truly viable as you don't need to feed them any kills and deprive your other damaging units thanks to Micaiah.
PS: I am not saying Ivy is bad. The strongest strat when playing the game is to hyper-invest in a small group of units, and if you hyper-invest in her she does pop off. Someone has to receive your boosters and SP, and in every playthrough characters are going to get invested. But with her levels of investment required, you could easily make another unit that already is excellent pop off even harder. If I were to make a tier list, Ivy would be A-rank.
Basically everyone early game wants a second seal if you plan to use them so yes it is contested. Also for those Master Seals there are plenty of better candidates, Alear, Etie,Louis, Jean being a few. Alear wants out of Divine Dragon for better compat, Etie is an amazing Player Phase unit in Warrior while Louis is probably the best Enemy Phase unit (debatable with Goldmary though) in Griffin Knight, and Jean is basically equal to Anna in Mage Knight except has longer to grow and grows in a class with staff utility meaning he has less need for Micaiah.
😢 Promo'SM
I'd say Anna is actually worth the investment, Clanne joins lvl 1 and the exp gain is low on Maddening so he actually struggles reaching level 5 without being fed kills, Micaiah turns anyone into a staff bot who'd gain a lot of exp, Anna is the one who gain the most from this and the return on investment is a second pandreo (and it's not too much). To me the main difference between investment and favoritism lies in the following question : who makes the most of a given ressource ? Anna makes the most of the exp given by Micaiah and there's little competition for it.
Shinon and Titania fall off at the end
I've found that Anna can actually be trained up to be strong with minimal investment.
You can immediately reclass her to Mage. You may think this makes her promote later, but it really doesn't. Early game Master Seals are in short supply, while Second Seals are a lot less contested. If you train up Anna through chip and giving her the odd kill, by the time she reaches level 10, you've gotten your next batch of Master Seals and can promote then. Doing this also results in a slightly better Anna than if you levelled her up through fighter.
I agree the worst 2 units in engage are Anna and Bunet, but at least Bunet is useable
The issue is Mia with Wo-Dao has a say 40% chance to one round, Titania has 0% chance to one round due to not doubling or not strong enough. Even if Titania does 90% and take less damage in return, Mia is still better in this situation.
Also the player gets to choose what units do, as long as there exists good matchups on the map, the player can avoid the bad matchups, making them a non-issue.
Who exactly is Mia 1 rounding with 24 base atk even with 2 crits? The mages?
@@fireembros1165 Haven't played RD in a long time but since people like her she surely must be killing some things.
8:59 Sorry to keep being this guy, but its pronounced TI-TA-NIA
I wrote it into the video that I mispronounced.
where?@@fireembros1165
sorry didn't pay attention@@fireembros1165
I'll always approve of shitting on Engage Anna
I will never understand the obsession with Clanne, a unit who requires just as much if not more effort/favoritism to get to promotion in a timely manner, while also requiring continued spirit dust and forge investment throughout the game to continue being able to do his job.
One thing that I think gets overblown with Anna is the opportunity cost of Micaiah. First of all, since she's an axe fighter Anna is perfectly capable of using Mercurius, so she can take advantage of either of the EXP boosting emblems. More importantly though, when you're not LTCing there often isn't any particularly great unit to dump EXP into. I usually do chapter 6 -> Paralogue 2 -> Paralogue 1 -> chapter 7, 6 first for Micaiah/well unlock, paralogue 2 for the master seal, and while you could save paralogue 1, doing it before Brodia is better imo because there's a dog in paralogue 1 but not in any of the Brodia maps. By the time I've finished Paralogue 2, Chloe is always at promotion (and usually does so immediately), and both Alear and Celine are almost always at level 10. In this scenario, who would get Marth and Micaiah? Chloe has way better things to do that get Micaiah babied, and if she's your main combat unit she'll be pushing the EXP ceiling regardless. Alear's levels after 10 barely matter if you're using them as a Griffin support like usual. Celine's combat is workable but extremely mediocre mid and long term, and the rest of Firene is extremely replaceable. As long as Anna hits 10 by the end of chapter 7, the opportunity cost is fairly minimal. And even if you want to give Framme a Micaiah map to make sure she hits 10 to have that option open, it's pretty easy and doesn't take that many turns to give Anna a double Micaiah engage on chapter 7, or if you do want to play faster, to give Anna Marth for one of P1/Ch7.
So two things:
The first is I didn’t quite say Clanne is a better unit not did I say I was bringing him to endgame. My logic with clanne was just to prove that even the most mediocre of units can meet those benchmarks until Pandreo arrives.
The second thing is: saying Anna is the BEST user of the Micaiah ring experience is like saying somebody DESERVES to use bonus exp in RD. It’s just not true.
Celine has uniqueness and is in a class that only she can do certain things in the game. She’s a valid user. Framme is also a unique unit that is already gaining experience and is already providing utility that can also use the ring. Even if you wanna switch the ring to Chloe and put a combat ring on someone else so Chloe catches up/snowball/whatever. You have that option. Yunaka is there too for utility or whatever if you want to use the ring. Citrine can benefit from it as well. Literally anyone can use the ring in the early game portion while ALSO not being an extreme liability in combat (besides perhaps frame).
Because of that just saying “Anna” is the best user, when really she’s not contributing that much from her join time until her promotion in chapter 11 or 12 (because we’re probably promoting Chloe or Alear before) always comes off as weird to me, since everyone else can do great sacrifice and combat at this point in time if needed.
I’m not arguing she not a good unit mid to great game. And any unit can work in engage. To me, there are just so many more other options available that she’s completely unnecessary and doesn’t justify her poor performance for like.. 5/6 chapters.
When talking about the highest difficulties maybe you should be a bit more selective and aware of what you're using but on lower difficulties just use whoever you want anybody can get by if you're not on the highest difficulties I absolutely love Mia but even I didn't like trade away stat item from the Dawn brigade I just gave her a bunch of bonus experience that's all she really needs
People gotta stop with the Anna hate. Those five levels are easy to get in 1-2 maps with the Micaiah ring, and she’s the BEST candidate for the ring at that point because the units you’re already training would rather spend their turns on combat. A second seal and master seal are a heavy investment, but you don’t need to give her the first ones you get, and half of the units in the game show up after the point you can buy them freely, so chances are you don’t have a lot of candidates for them anyway. And the icing on the cake is that not only does she become a monster magic unit, but she makes MONEY, allowing you to invest more into other units with weapons, staves, and forges
This is fair
I heavily disagree with the anna take, with the addition of the well, the money needed for 2nd and master seals is nothing. Yeah anna needs kills and some sort of xp via marth or micaiah, but i’d argue that level of investment is much less than comparable magic units requiring specific forges and rings for accuracy and speed purposes, once Anna is online which does not take that long, she is one of the best units for about half the game from chapter 12-13ish and onward. The only 2 units that dont need as much investment as anna to be great magical units are chloe and pandreo. Characters like ivy and citrinne both need speed and accuracy fixing that Anna does not need.
The downsides you talked about in the anna section are extremely weird imo
The seals are a non issue when literally every character in the game needs them besides like veyle and chloe
The micia thing honestly isnt bad of all the early game units who’d actually wanna use her anna is by far the best and only needs 5 levels to get off the ground all other early game units are either far worse than tons of other options(alfred bouch etie etc) or are already good and getting exp from combat or healing (alear chloe louis celenne framme) unless your already planning on using one of the weak early game units anna with mic makes the most sense imo to get training itd take 3 maps max if you have a semi clue on what to do
Also the clanne comparison doesnt really hold up their stats at that point in the game dont matter a whole lot chapter 1-14 are the easiest part of the game where any unit can preform just fine the actual need for good stats arent needed till after where anna would surpass him anyway(also celica cannot fix magic till the final few maps due to her avalanche at most they can get magic 2+ which cost do much sp for only 2 more damage their better off getting sword power from roy for levin sword builds)
Also the pandreo point just use both lol having a 2nd pandreo is insanely good magic is the best form of damage in late game maddening having 2 broken magic units is amazing and of the units available for mage knight pan and anna are the best 2 for it imo (ivy would rather stay in her unique class meanwhile citrinne is too slow for my liking anf clanne isnt really that good for magic classes in the first place)
I think favoritism is underrated in some fire emblem games. Linear stats are insane, linear stats are so unlinear and geometrically scaling that the fact they are "linear" is rather comical. Speaking in path of radiance terms (my fav), 2 dracoshields is far more valuable on 1 unit than 2 units with 1 dracoshield each, so much more valuable that the comparison isn't even worth considering. The reason that people put all their effort into Mia or Nephenee is they like them, they feed them and then they can take over the entire game because juicing the stats of one unit is the utterly optimal way to play any game with linear stats. If you don't care about the turn counter (like 99% of FE players) the best way to play is by letting a few units rip the enemy to shreds on enemy phase.
Coming at it from another front, unit uniqueness is also VERY important when discussing investment vs favoritism. I have ALWAYS defended Nephenee favoritism in Path of Radiance because Wrath is such a genuinely insane and busted skill (#2 in the game), and Nephenee is the only unit that can use it other than the one (1) other unit you can give the wrath scroll to. If you want Ike to use aether (his signature ability) the lategame general with Resolve (#1 skill in the game) is usually the person who you save it for the whole game so you won't be using anyone else with Wrath until you literally topple the throne of Daein. I've had to sit through many videos and read many posts where people whine that Nephenee's stats and level are a little low for her starting chapter, then completely brushing off the fact that she has the best skill in the entire game for 2/3 of the runtime.
Anna costs you outlined are quite weak. This is one of the best units in the game that pops off from using her. After 2500 hours in Engage Maddening, multiple different challenge runs, running every unit on multiple classes in different team comps I can safely say the unit is objectively one of the best stat-wise and what she brings to the team compared to other options.
We need to stop spreading blatant misinformation on topics because of poor faith arguments.
Five Levels. EVERY UNIT NEEDS LEVELS TO FUNCTION. Kagetsu is garbage if you don't level him, do we consider this an investment cost to using the unit? We do not.
Second Seal - 2.5k in a normal maddening run is nothing, a lot of units want 2 seals, this unit is THE ONLY UNIT IN THE GAME that can get you money, she will easily make 2.5k (5 passive procs) throughout a playthrough even if she is barely used.
Master Seal - Almost every unit in the game wants at least 1 seal.
Micaiah Ring - She can level from 5-10 on CH7 with semi-optimal Micaiah XP grind in under 15 turns, or without slowing you down at all or being in danger at all over CH7/8 then hits level 10 and pops off immediately on Warrior, Griffin Knight, Mage Knight, or Sage. No one else really wants Micaiah ring in early game as it is a staff bot/non-combat ring, most hard carry units want Sigurd, Leif, Roy, or Marth.
Feeding Kills - you do not need to have her get kills if she staff bots, or if you think you do, you are using the Micaiah ring wrong. Great Sac scales XP per healed target as does Augment staff healing, if you plus shape heal you get a ton of XP rapidly. All early game units are fed kills. You feed Alear kills, you feed Chloe kills, you feed literally every unit in the game in general kills so it can level to function.
Protection - She actually has higher HP than you realize and can tank a single combat at base almost immediately (even in her join map) also every caster is frail including Pandreo so this is just not true. On Warrior she can tank better than you'd think with decent speed/high HP and her warrior build without emblems/passives is quite strong (Ringless/No Somniel Run I've done 3 times).
As for the Clanne comparison.
Clanne is LEVEL 1 and has good speed but abysmal magic. He is also lower HP than Anna and has these costs:
9 levels before he is good
Master Seal
Feeding Kills
Protection
LOW MAGIC
No other standout features outside of ok Speed.
Anna VS Clanne 10/10 Mage Knight (Fixed mode, Random is for babies)
Anna
Lv. 5 - Lv. 10 Axe Fighter => Lv. 1 - Lv. 10 Mage Knight
⚙ Fixed Mode
HP 33 | Str 9 | Mag 18 | Dex 19 | Spd 19 | Lck 11 | Def 8 | Res 19 | Bld 7
Clanne
Lv. 1 - Lv. 10 Mage => Lv. 1 - Lv. 10 Mage Knight
⚙ Fixed Mode
HP 30 | Str 12 | Mag 14 | Dex 21 | Spd 21 | Lck 8 | Def 12 | Res 17 | Bld 6 | Mov 6
:hp:Anna has +3 HP.
:atk:Clanne has +3 strength.
:mag:Anna has +4 magic.
:skl:Clanne has +2 dexterity.
:spd:Clanne has +2 speed.
:lck:Anna has +3 luck.
:def:Clanne has +4 defense.
:res:Anna has +2 resistance.
:bld:Anna has +1 build.
So Clanne is +1 SPEED (Anna has 1 more build, 4 less magic than her.
10/20 Mage Knight:
Anna
Lv. 5 - Lv. 10 Axe Fighter => Lv. 1 - Lv. 20 Mage Knight
⚙ Fixed Mode
HP 39 | Str 11 | Mag 26 | Dex 24 | Spd 24 | Lck 16 | Def 11 | Res 25 | Bld 7 | Mov 6
Clanne
Lv. 1 - Lv. 10 Mage => Lv. 1 - Lv. 20 Mage Knight
⚙ Fixed Mode
HP 34 | Str 16 | Mag 17 | Dex 25 | Spd 27 | Lck 11 | Def 16 | Res 22 | Bld 7 | Mov 6
What is easier to get, 3 Speed (Clanne's advantage here) or NINE MAGIC.
The only unit who is better than Anna on MK early on is Pandreo, she has more magic but he is actually much faster than her.
However near Endgame he speed caps and she catches up to him and maintains a +5 magic advantage on him:
10/30 vs 15/25 MK
Anna
Lv. 5 - Lv. 10 Axe Fighter => Lv. 1 - Lv. 30 Mage Knight
⚙ Fixed Mode
HP 45 | Str 13 | Mag 33 | Dex 29 | Spd 30 | Lck 21 | Def 14 | Res 31 | Bld 8 | Mov 6
Pandreo
Lv. 1 High Priest => Lv. 1 - Lv. 25 Mage Knight
⚙ Fixed Mode
HP 47 | Str 11 | Mag 28 | Dex 28 | Spd 31 | Lck 19 | Def 14 | Res 39 | Bld 12 | Mov 6
Results
:hp:Pandreo has +2 HP.
:atk:Anna has +2 strength.
:mag:Anna has +5 magic.
:skl:Anna has +1 dexterity.
:spd:Pandreo has +1 speed.
:lck:Anna has +2 luck.
:def:Equal defense.
:res:Pandreo has +8 resistance.
:bld:Pandreo has +4 build.
:mov:Equal movement.
This isn’t misinformation. This is my opinion on a subject. I state that in the begging of the video and I outline why I think so.
I do think the seal is important because you have to feed her an EARLY game master seal and second seal for her to be optimal. Which I just prefer on other units.
Any unit in engage can be great. I personally can’t justify Anna’s atrocious early game, for a marginally better endgame than pandreo and would prefer to invest it in another unit.
That’s my opinion. That’s not misinformation.
Also, having more HP but still being one rounded by everything is an issue due to her poor spd. At least the other units can avoid taking a hit early game.
Saying “nobody” uses the micaiah ring better than her is legit just outright favoritism. There are tons of units there that could gain exp depending on your playstyle. You could argue you PREFER to give her that and that’s fine. But outright trying to state it as a FACT that she’s the best user of something is not something I even went to the extreme of disapproving in this video either, so it is an extreme statement.
Also, of course it’s either kills or micaiah. The fact of the matter still remains, you’re taking away that resource/ experience from another unit that can be put to use.
Now does that unit use it better is the real argument? You believe it does. I don’t. I don’t appreciate her contributions mid to late game because I’ve found that there are plenty of other units that do her job or I prefer to bring along that are just as serviceable without all that early game carrying. And carrying a unit for 5 to 6 chapters (even more because it’s not like she’s magically a powerhouse upon immediate promotion) in a game with 26 story chapters is over 25% of the game.
@@fireembros1165 Name all the units who have better long term prospects from the early game that want Micaiah.
All the good early game units tend to want combat XP/killing things emblems and of those:
Alear - Forced, Marth (Typically)
Chloe - Great early/mid/long term, Sig/Roy
Amber - Good STR, kind of slow, has issues, worse than middlegame carries Sig/Roy/Leif
Citrinne - Good Mag, very slow, falls off late game, Sig/Celica, could Micaiah her, though Anna can 5 to 10 on Citrinne's join map so you can run it on both.
Framme - Staffbot that levels herself to 10 without any help doesn't need Micaiah, power leveling her can be done for free via chain guard farming if you want to degen. Power leveling Framme on something like MK is OK but she has less MAG than Anna but similar Speed, so you get an ok result that has less damage and does not make you 10-30k from using her throughout the run.
Anna starts out -4 MAG but slightly faster than Cit on MK and eventually gets to Citrinne's magic stat but has much higher Speed and better stats overall while also making you money. Cit starts at LV 10 but Anna can go from 5 to 10 in Citrinne's join map and has better long term prospects as she is +8 Speed/1 to 0 less mag at IL 35-40 MK.
Other early game units you could consider:
Celine: Medium speed/mag, generally slighty slower than Anna with much less MAG and needs more DAM fixing.
Louis: Slow tank with OK STR
Clanne: Slow to level/competes directly with Alear to level early game, has worse performance than low invested in Pandreo/Ivy MK or even a hort MK.
Jean: Actually can match Anna stat-wise Mag/SPD, but starts at Level 1. Also does not make you money for free and also has same seal cost as her but no way to pay for it.
Anna immediately 1 rounds it sounds like you just haven't used her and are making arguments around why she is bad without having firsthand knowledge of using the unit but claim she is bad anyways (misinformation 1 year after game is out).
Upon promoting to warrior she can 1 shot flying units immediately (master seal cost) and in some cases double/1 round on axes with minimal help. She can stay on warrior and 1 shot flying enemies on Radiant bow with no passives the entire game. She is a BACKUP that can staffbot, you can position her near enemies while healing to get free damage early game, you can also hand her a forged engraved axe and she can 1 shot things on Sigurd with momentum. You have manufactured nonsense as cons she frankly does not have to justify your opinion on the unit and all this really tells me is you lack game knowledge but want to argue a thing is bad anyways.
When promoting to MK if you hand her Leif (NO ONE WANTS LEIF EARLY) she can 1 round on levin quite easily immediately upon master sealing.
As for the durability thing, she has above average HP for a MK and most MK builds want bonded, chain guarded etc, so this is not a unique cost. On WARRIOR she is actually tanky as she is fast and has higher HP on the class. On ringless no somniel maddening run Anna Warrior is naturally very fast (fixed mode) and contributes immensely. She can out tank most units in the run without any help. I had to set up kills for her in that run explicitly but compared to other things in that format, she is objectively one of the strongest. In normal play, leveling her is not even an issue and there are not better options. You can run whoever you like but from early game very few units are actually good.
@@IcedCoffeeGaming I have absolutely used Anna, and no she did not 1 round anything on her join chapter or anything afterwards for quite a while. She did scale excellently into endgame but, wasn’t worth the hassle for me.
I don’t doubt she can work. But even right now, you wrote what’s equivalent to 4/5 paragraphs, naming all the things you had to do to get her there. And maybe you don’t think that’s a cost and that’s fine.
Here’s how to get pandreo online:
Deploy.
Also I do prefer Framme as a recipient or Celine. Even if they can still get exp from other actions, I prefer getting them to their target 10 to promotion faster via using Micaiah, instead of holding Micaiah hostage on Anna. Even better: this way you can reasonably get both to 10 if you desire to bring both. Or not.
Obliviously it’s players choice, but I don’t like having to invest into Anna for a return that I deem minimal.
Does it matter in a single player game? I mean the only "bad" way to invest is if you bring about a bad state of play.